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By Barbara W. Tuchman
BIBLE AND SWORD (1956)
THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM (1958)
THE GUNS OF AUGUST (1962)
THE PROUD TOWER (1966)
STILWELL AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN CHINA (1971)
NOTES FROM CHINA (1972)
A DISTANT MIRROR (1978)
PRACTICING HISTORY (1981)
THE MARCH OF FOLLY (1984)
THE FIRST SALUTE (1988)

A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1978 by Barbara W. Tuchman
Maps copyright © 1978 by Anita Karl
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random
House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-88536
eISBN: 978-0-307-79369-0
v3.1

Contents
Cover
Map
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Maps and Illustrations
Foreword
Part One

“I Am the Sire de Coucy”: The Dynasty

Born to Woe: The Century

Youth and Chivalry

War

“This Is the End of the World”: The Black Death

The Battle of Poitiers

Decapitated France: The Bourgeois Rising and the Jacquerie
Photo Insert

Hostage in England

Enguerrand and Isabella

Sons of Iniquity

The Gilded Shroud

Double Allegiance

Coucy’s War

England’s Turmoil

The Emperor in Paris

The Papal Schism
Part Two

Coucy’s Rise

The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions

The Lure of Italy

A Second Norman Conquest

The Fiction Cracks

The Siege of Barbary

In a Dark Wood
Photo Insert

Danse Macabre

Lost Opportunity

Nicopolis

Hung Be the Heavens with Black
Epilogue
Bibliography
Reference Notes
About the Author

—JOHN DRYDEN,
“On the Characters in the Canterbury Tales,”
in Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern
“For mankind is ever the same and nothing is lost out of nature, though everything is
altered.”

Acknowledgments
I would like to express my thanks to all who have helped me in one
way or another to write this book: to Maître Henri Crepin, Deputy
Mayor of Coucy-le-Château and president of the Association for
Restoration of the Castle of Coucy and Its Environs, for his
hospitality and guidance; to my editor Robert Gottlieb for
enthusiasm and belief in the book as well as judicious
improvements; to my daughter Alma Tuchman for substantial
research, my friend Katrina Romney for sustained interest and to
both for critical reading. For rst aid in medieval complexities, I am
especially indebted to Professors Elizabeth A. R. Brown and John
Henneman; also to Professor Howard Garey for elucidating problems
of medieval French, and to Mr. Richard Famiglietti for the benet of
his familiarity with sources in the period. For various advice,
guidance, translations and answers to queries, I am grateful to
Professors John Benton, Giles Constable, Eugene Cox, J. N.
Hillgarth, Harry A. Miskimin, Lynn White, Mrs. Phyllis W. G.
Gordan, John Plummer of the Morgan Library, and, in France,
Professors Robert Fossier of the Sorbonne, Raymond Cazelles of
Chantilly, Philippe Wol of Toulouse, Mme. Therese d’Alveney of
the Bibliothèque Nationale, M. Yves Metman of the Archives
Nationales, Bureaux des Sceaux, M. Georges Dumas of the Archives
de l’Aisne, and M. Depouilly of the Museum of Soissons; also to
Professor Irwin Saunders for introductions to the Institute for Balkan
Studies in Soa, and to Professors Topkova-Zaimova and Elisabeth
Todorova of that Institute for assisting my visit to Nicopolis; also to
Widener Library at Harvard and Sterling Library at Yale for
borrowing privileges, and to the helpful and knowledgeable sta of
the New York Public Library for assistance of many kinds. To

unnamed others who appeared briey to lend a hand on my journey
of seven years, my gratitude is equal.

Maps and Illustrations
Maps
Europe in the 14th Century
France after the Treaty of Brétigny, 1360
Italy in 1360
The Swiss Campaign, 1375–76
Nicopolis and Other Castles on the Danube (BN: Ms. Lat. 7239, fo.
113–14)
Illustrations
COLOR PLATES

The royal palace in Paris (BN: Ms. Fr. 23279, fo. 53)
2, 3. The Eects of Good Government, in the City and in the Country, by
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Scala/Editorial Photocolor Archives)

The Battle of Poitiers (BN: Ms. Fr. 2643, fo. 207)

Deer hunt from Hours of Marguerite d’Orléans (BN: Ms. Lat. 1156B, fo. 163)

Guidoriccio da Fogliano, by Simone Martini (Scala/Editorial Photocolor Archives)

Banquet for the Emperor (BN: Ms. Fr. 2813, fo. 473v)

Departure for Mahdia campaign (British Museum: Harleian mss. 4379, fo. 60b)

Bal des Ardents (BN: Ms. Fr. 2646, fo. 176)

BLACK AND WHITE PLATES
7.1Coucy-le-Château (from Androuet Du Cerceau, Les plus excellents bâtiments de
France, 1648)
7.2The abandoned castle in later years (from Alexandre Du Sommerard, Les Arts au
Moyen Age, 10th ser., pl. IX)
7.3 Fortune’s wheel (Morgan Library: Ms. 324, fo. 34v)
7.4 Coucy’s seals (AN: Bureaux des sceaux)
7.5 Chaucer’s squire (The Huntington Library: Ellesmere ms. 26, C9)
7.6 A 14th century carriage (Zentralbibliothek, Zürich)
7.7 View of Paris (BN: Ms. Fr. 2645, fo. 321v)
7.8 A country village (BN: Ms. Fr. 22531)
7.9 Charles of Navarre (Photo: Giraudon)
7.10 Jean II (The Louvre)
7.11 The Black Prince (Dean and Chapter of Canterbury)
7.12 English archers (British Museum: Addit. mss. 42130, fo. 147v)
7.13 View of London (British Museum: Royal mss. 16F 11, fo. 73)
7.14 The Last Judgment (Archives photographiques, Paris)
7.15 The world as a globe (BN: Ms. 574, fo. 42)
7.16 The child’s education (Morgan Library: Ms. 456, fo. 68v)
7.17 Pillage and burning (BN: Ms. Fr. 2644, fo. 135)
7.18 A charivari (BN: Ms. Fr. 146, fo. 34)
7.19 The fourth horseman of the apocalypse (Musée Condé, Chantilly; Photo:
Giraudon)
7.20 The Triumph of Death (Scala/Editorial Photocolor Archives)
7.21 Burial of the plague victims (Bibliothèque royale, Bruxelles: Ms. 13076–77, fo.
24; Photo: Giraudon)
7.22 Penitential procession (Musée Condé, Chantilly; Photo: Giraudon)

7.23 A Cardinal (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters Collection, Munsey
Fund, 1932, and Gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 1947)
7.24 Knights (AN; Photo: Giraudon)
7.25 Peasants (Musée Condé, Chantilly; Photo: Giraudon)
7.26 Slaughter of the Jacques (BN: Ms. Fr. 2643, fo. 226v)
7.27 Murder of the marshals (BN: Ms. Fr. 2813, fo. 409v)
7.28 The war-dog (BN: Ms. Lat. 7239, fo. 61r)
7.29 The Battle of Sluys (BN: Ms. Fr. 2643, fo. 72)
7.30 Widowed Rome (BN: Ms. Ital. 81, fo. 18)
7.31 Florence (BN: Vb, 37 fol.)
23.1 Papal palace at Avignon (Prints Division, New York Public Library)
23.2 Coins (American Numismatic Society)
23.3 A Sienese army (from Aldo Cairola, Il Palazzo Pubblico di Siena, Copyright©
1963 Editalia)
23.4, 23.5. The Swiss campaign (Berner Chronik, facsimile ed., Bern, 1943, vol. 1,
pls. 202 and 206, Copyright 1943, Aare Verlag Bern)
23.6 Sir John Hawkwood (Scala/Editorial Photocolor Archives)
23.7 Pierre de Luxemburg (Musée Calvet, Avignon; Photo: Braun)
23.8 Burning of the Jews (Bibliothèque royale, Bruxelles: Ms. 13076–77, fo. 12v
23.9 Jew (Cathedral of Tarragona; Photo Mas, Barcelona)
23.10 Christine de Pisan (BN: Ms. Fr. 835, fo. 1)
23.11 Jean de Berry (Archives photographiques, Paris)
23.12 Philip of Burgundy (Photo: Giraudon)
23.13 Charles V receiving Aristotle’s Ethics (Bibliothèque royale, Bruxelles: Ms. 9505–
06, fo. 1)
23.14 Pope Urban VI (Photo: Leonard Von Matt, Buochs, Switzerland)
23.15 Clement VII (Photo: Giraudon)
23.16 The siege of Mahdia (BN: Ms. Fr. 2646, fo. 79)

23.17 Louis d’Orléans (Photo: Giraudon)
23.18 The Visconti device (BN: Ms. Lat. 6340, fo. 901v)
23.19 Gian Galeazzo Visconti (The Louvre; Photo: Giraudon)
23.20 Froissart oering his Chronicles to Charles VI (BN: Ms. Fr., nouv. acq., 9604,
fo. 1)
23.21 Gerson preaching (Bibliothèque municipale de Valencienne; Photo: Giraudon)
23.22, 23.23 Bureau de la Rivière and Cardinal Jean de La Grange (Archives
photographiques, Paris)
23.24 Egy of Guillaume de Harsigny (Museum of Laon)
23.25 Danse Macabre (Archives photographiques, Paris)
23.26 Lamentation of the Virgin (BN: Ms. Lat. 9471, fo. 135)
23.27 Massacre of the prisoners at Nicopolis (BN: Ms. Fr. 2646, fo. 255v)
23.28 Posthumous portrait of Coucy (Museum of Soissons)
23.29 Ruins of the donjon of Coucy in 1917 (Association for the Restoration of Coucy
and Its Environs)
23.30 Coucy-le-Château today (Photo: S.P.A.D.E.M.)

Foreword

T
The Period, the Protagonist, the Hazards
he genesis of this book was a desire to nd out what were the
eects on society of the most lethal disaster of recorded
history—that is to say, of the Black Death of 1348–50, which
killed an estimated one third of the population living
between India and Iceland. Given the possibilities of our own time,
the reason for my interest is obvious. The answer proved elusive
because the 14th century suered so many “strange and great perils
and adversities” (in the words of a contemporary) that its disorders
cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoofprints of more
than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become
seven—plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government,
insurrection, and schism in the Church. All but plague itself arose
from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued
after the period of plague was over.
Although my initial question has escaped an answer, the interest
of the period itself—a violent, tormented, bewildered, suering and
disintegrating age, a time, as many thought, of Satan triumphant—
was compelling and, as it seemed to me, consoling in a period of
similar disarray. If our last decade or two of collapsing assumptions
has been a period of unusual discomfort, it is reassuring to know
that the human species has lived through worse before.
Curiously, the “phenomenal parallels” have been applied by
another historian to earlier years of this century. Comparing the
aftermaths of the Black Death and of World War I, James Westfall
Thompson found all the same complaints: economic chaos, social
unrest, high prices, proteering, depraved morals, lack of
production, industrial indolence, frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure,
luxury, debauchery, social and religious hysteria, greed, avarice,
maladministration, decay of manners. “History never repeats itself,”

said Voltaire; “man always does.” Thucydides, of course, made that
principle the justication of his work.
Simply summarized by the Swiss historian, J. C. L. S. de Sismondi,
the 14th century was “a bad time for humanity.” Until recently,
historians tended to dislike and to skirt the century because it could
not be made to t into a pattern of human progress. After the
experiences of the terrible 20th century, we have greater fellow-
feeling for a distraught age whose rules were breaking down under
the pressure of adverse and violent events. We recognize with a
painful twinge the marks of “a period of anguish when there is no
sense of an assured future.”
The interval of 600 years permits what is signicant in human
character to stand out. People of the Middle Ages existed under
mental, moral, and physical circumstances so dierent from our
own as to constitute almost a foreign civilization. As a result,
qualities of conduct that we recognize as familiar amid these alien
surroundings are revealed as permanent in human nature. If one
insists upon a lesson from history, it lies here, as discovered by the
French medievalist Edouard Perroy when he was writing a book on
the Hundred Years’ War while dodging the Gestapo during World
War II. “Certain ways of behavior,” he wrote, “certain reactions
against fate, throw mutual light upon each other.”
The fty years that followed the Black Death of 1348–50 are the
core of what seems to me a coherent historical period extending
approximately from 1300 to 1450 plus a few years. To narrow the
focus to a manageable area, I have chosen a particular person’s life
as the vehicle of my narrative. Apart from human interest, this has
the advantage of enforced obedience to reality. I am required to
follow the circumstances and the sequence of an actual medieval
life, lead where they will, and they lead, I think, to a truer version
of the period than if I had imposed my own plan.
The person in question is not a king or queen, because everything
about such persons is ipso facto exceptional, and, besides, they are
overused; nor a commoner, because commoners’ lives in most cases
did not take in the wide range that I wanted; nor a cleric or saint,
because they are outside the limits of my comprehension; nor a

woman, because any medieval woman whose life was adequately
documented would be atypical.
The choice is thus narrowed to a male member of the Second
Estate—that is, of the nobility—and has fallen upon Enguerrand de
Coucy VII, last of a great dynasty and “the most experienced and
skillful of all the knights of France.” His life from 1340 to 1397
coincided with the period that concerned me, and, from the death of
his mother in the great plague to his own perfectly timed death in
the culminating asco of the century, seemed designed for my
purpose.
Through marriage to the eldest daughter of the King of England,
he acquired a double allegiance bridging two countries at war,
which enlarged the scope and enriched the interest of his career; he
played a role, usually major, in every public drama of his place and
time, and he had the good sense to become a patron of the greatest
contemporary chronicler, Jean Froissart, with the result that more is
known about him than might otherwise have been the case. He has
one grievous imperfection—that no authentic portrait of him exists.
He has, however, a compensating advantage, for me: that, except for
a single brief article published in 1939, nothing has been written
about him in English, and no formal, reliable biography in French
except for a doctoral thesis of 1890 that exists only in manuscript. I
like nding my own way.
I must beg the reader to have patience in making Coucy’s
acquaintance because he can only be known against the background
and events of his time which ll the rst half dozen chapters.
Enguerrand (pronounced with a hard “g”) made his rst mark on
history at the age of eighteen in 1358, which does not occur until
Chapter 7.
I come now to the hazards of the enterprise. First are uncertain
and contradictory data with regard to dates, numbers, and hard
facts. Dates may seem dull and pedantic to some, but they are
fundamental because they establish sequence—what precedes and
what follows—thereby leading toward an understanding of cause
and eect. Unfortunately, medieval chronology is extremely hard to
pin down. The year was considered to begin at Easter and since this

could fall any time between March 22 and April 22, a xed date of
March 25 was generally preferred. The change over to New Style
took place in the 16th century but was not everywhere accepted
until the 18th, which leaves the year to which events of January,
February, and March belong in the 14th century a running enigma—
further complicated by use of the regnal year (dating from the
reigning King’s accession) in ocial English documents of the 14th
century and use of the papal year in certain other cases. Moreover,
chroniclers did not date an event by the day of the month but by the
religious calendar—speaking, for example, of two days before the
Nativity of the Virgin, or the Monday after Epiphany, or St. John the
Baptist’s Day, or the third Sunday in Lent. The result is to confuse
not only the historian but the inhabitants of the 14th century
themselves, who rarely if ever agree on the same date for any event.
Numbers are no less basic because they indicate what proportion
of the population is involved in a given situation. The chronic
exaggeration of medieval numbers—of armies, for example—when
accepted as factual, has led in the past to a misunderstanding of
medieval war as analogous to modern war, which it was not, in
means, method, or purpose. It should be assumed that medieval
gures for military forces, battle casualties, plague deaths,
revolutionary hordes, processions, or any groups en masse are
generally enlarged by several hundred percent. This is because the
chroniclers did not use numbers as data but as a device of literary
art to amaze or appall the reader. Use of Roman numerals also made
for lack of precision and an anity for round numbers. The gures
were uncritically accepted and repeated by generation after
generation of historians. Only since the end of the last century have
scholars begun to re-examine the documents and nd, for instance,
the true strength of an expeditionary force from paymasters’
records. Yet still they disagree. J. C. Russell puts the pre-plague
population of France at 21 million, Ferdinand Lot at 15 or 16
million, and Edouard Perroy at a lowly 10 to 11 million. Size of
population aects studies of everything else—taxes, life expectancy,
commerce and agriculture, famine or plenty—and here are gures
by modern authorities which dier by 100 percent. Chroniclers’

gures which seem obviously distorted appear in my text in
quotation marks.
Discrepancies of supposed fact were often due to mistakes of oral
transmission or later misreading of a manuscript source, as when
the Dame de Courcy, subject of an international scandal, was
mistaken by an otherwise careful 19th century historian for Coucy’s
second wife, at a cost, for a while, of devastating confusion to the
present author. The Comte d’Auxerre in the Battle of Poitiers was
variously rendered by English chroniclers as Aunser, Aussure,
Soussiere, Usur, Waucerre, and by the Grandes Chroniques of France
as Sancerre, a dierent fellow altogether. Enguerrand was written as
Ingelram in England. It is not surprising that I took the name
Canolles to be a variant of the notorious brigand captain Arnaut de
Cervole, only to nd, when the circumstances refused to t, that it
was instead a variant of Knowles or Knollys, an equally notorious
English captain. Though minor, this sort of diculty can be
unnerving.
Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, is described by one historian
as a tall blonde and by another as a “dark, lively, little woman.” The
Turkish Sultan Bajazet, reputed by his contemporaries to be bold,
enterprising, and avid for war, and surnamed Thunderbolt for the
rapidity of his strikes, is described by a modern Hungarian historian
as “eeminate, sensual, irresolute and vacillating.”
It may be taken as axiomatic that any statement of fact about the
Middle Ages may (and probably will) be met by a statement of the
opposite or a dierent version. Women outnumbered men because
men were killed o in the wars; men outnumbered women because
women died in childbirth. Common people were familiar with the
Bible; common people were unfamiliar with the Bible. Nobles were
tax exempt; no, they were not tax exempt. French peasants were
lthy and foul-smelling and lived on bread and onions; French
peasants ate pork, fowl, and game and enjoyed frequent baths in the
village bathhouses. The list could be extended indenitely.
Contradictions, however, are part of life, not merely a matter of
conicting evidence. I would ask the reader to expect
contradictions, not uniformity. No aspect of society, no habit,

custom, movement, development, is without cross-currents. Starving
peasants in hovels live alongside prosperous peasants in featherbeds.
Children are neglected and children are loved. Knights talk of honor
and turn brigand. Amid depopulation and disaster, extravagance
and splendor were never more extreme. No age is tidy or made of
whole cloth, and none is a more checkered fabric than the Middle
Ages.
One must also remember that the Middle Ages change color
depending on who is looking at them. Historians’ prejudices and
points of view—and thus their selection of material—have changed
considerably over a period of 600 years. During the three centuries
following the 14th, history was virtually a genealogy of nobility,
devoted to tracing dynastic lines and family connections and infused
by the idea of the noble as a superior person. These works of
enormous antiquarian research teem with information of more than
dynastic interest, such as Anselm’s item about the Gascon lord who
bequeathed a hundred livres for the dowries of poor girls he had
deowered.
The French Revolution marks the great reversal, following which
historians saw the common man as hero, the poor as ipso facto
virtuous, nobles and kings as monsters of iniquity. Simeon Luce, in
his history of the Jacquerie, is one of these, slanted in his text, yet
unique in his research and invaluable for his documents. The giants
of the 19th and early 20th centuries who unearthed and published
the sources, annotated and edited the chronicles, collected the
literary works, read and excerpted masses of sermons, treatises,
letters, and other primary material, provided the ground on which
we latecomers walk. Their work is now supplemented and balanced
by modern medievalists of the post-Marc Bloch era who have taken
a more sociological approach and turned up detailed hard facts
about daily life—for example, the number of communion wafers
sold in a particular diocese, as an indicator of religious observance.
My book is indebted to all these groups, beginning with the
primary chroniclers. I realize it is unfashionable among medievalists
today to rely on the chroniclers, but for a sense of the period and its

attitudes I nd them indispensable. Furthermore, their form is
narrative and so is mine.
With all this wealth, empty spaces nevertheless exist where the
problem is not contradictory information but no information. To
bridge the gap, one must make use of what seems the likely and
natural explanation, which accounts for the proliferation of
“probably” and “presumably” in my text—annoying but, in the
absence of documented certainty, unavoidable.
A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, is
overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad
side—of evil, misery, contention, and harm. In history this is exactly
the same as in the daily newspaper. The normal does not make
news. History is made by the documents that survive, and these lean
heavily on crisis and calamity, crime and misbehavior, because such
things are the subject matter of the documentary process—of
lawsuits, treaties, moralists’ denunciations, literary satire, papal
Bulls. No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something. Negative
overload can be seen at work in the religious reformer Nicolas de
Clamanges, who, in denouncing unt and worldly prelates in 1401,
said that in his anxiety for reform he would not discuss the good
clerics because “they do not count beside the perverse men.”
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts.
The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and
ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in
time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater
than the eect of disturbance, as we know from our own times.
After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world
consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water
mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-
Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the
evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than
one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate
Tuchman’s Law, as follows: “The fact of being reported multiplies
the apparent extent of any deplorable development by ve- to
tenfold” (or any gure the reader would care to supply).

Diculty of empathy, of genuinely entering into the mental and
emotional values of the Middle Ages, is the nal obstacle, The main
barrier is, I believe, the Christian religion as it then was: the matrix
and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory. Its
insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld
was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one
that the modern world does not share, no matter how devout some
present-day Christians may be. The rupture of this principle and its
replacement by belief in the worth of the individual and of an active
life not necessarily focused on God is, in fact, what created the
modern world and ended the Middle Ages.
What compounds the problem is that medieval society, while
professing belief in renunciation of the life of the senses, did not
renounce it in practice, and no part of it less so than the Church
itself. Many tried, a few succeeded, but the generality of mankind is
not made for renunciation. There never was a time when more
attention was given to money and possessions than in the 14th
century, and its concern with the esh was the same as at any other
time. Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.
The gap between medieval Christianity’s ruling principle and
everyday life is the great pitfall of the Middle Ages. It is the problem
that runs through Gibbon’s history, which he dealt with by a
delicately malicious levity, pricking at every turn what seemed to
him the hypocrisy of the Christian ideal as opposed to natural
human functioning. I do not think, however great my appreciation
of the master otherwise, that Gibbon’s method meets the problem.
Man himself was the formulator of the impossible Christian ideal
and tried to uphold it, if not live by it, for more than a millennium.
Therefore it must represent a need, something more fundamental
than Gibbon’s 18th century enlightenment allowed for, or his
elegant ironies could dispose of. While I recognize its presence, it
requires a more religious bent than mine to identify with it.
Chivalry, the dominant political idea of the ruling class, left as
great a gap between ideal and practice as religion. The ideal was a
vision of order maintained by the warrior class and formulated in
the image of the Round Table, nature’s perfect shape. King Arthur’s

knights adventured for the right against dragons, enchanters, and
wicked men, establishing order in a wild world. So their living
counterparts were supposed, in theory, to serve as defenders of the
Faith, upholders of justice, champions of the oppressed. In practice,
they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the
violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major
agency of disorder. When the gap between ideal and real becomes
too wide, the system breaks down. Legend and story have always
reected this; in the Arthurian romances the Round Table is
shattered from within. The sword is returned to the lake; the eort
begins anew. Violent, destructive, greedy, fallible as he may be, man
retains his vision of order and resumes his search.
A Note on Money
Medieval currencies derived originally from the libra (livre or
pound) of pure silver from which were struck 240 silver pennies,
later established as twelve pennies to the shilling or sous and 20
shillings or sous to the pound or livre. The orin, ducat, franc, livre,
écu, mark, and English pound were all theoretically more or less
equivalent to the original pound, although in the course of things
their weight and gold content varied. The nearest to a standard was
the coin containing 3.5 grams of gold minted by Florence (the
orin) and Venice (the ducat) in the mid-13th century. The word
“gold” attached to the name of a coin, as franc d’or, écu d’or, or
mouton d’or, signied a real coin. When expressed by the name of
the currency alone, or, in France, as a livre in one of its various
forms—parisis, tournois, bordelaise, each diering slightly in value—
the currency in question represented money of account which
existed only on paper.
Given this glimpse of the complications of the problem, the non-
specialist reader would be well advised not to worry about it,
because the names of coins and currency mean nothing anyway
except in terms of purchasing power. From time to time, in mention
of the pay of men-at-arms, the wages of laborers, the price of a

horse or a plow, the living expenses of a bourgeois family, the
amounts of hearth taxes and sales taxes, I have tried to relate
monetary gures to actual values. I have not attempted to translate
various currencies into the equivalent of only one, such as livres or
francs, because equivalency kept changing as did the gold or silver
content of the coinage; moreover, real coins and money of account
under the same name diered in value. I have, therefore, in each
case, simply adopted the currency named by the document or
chronicler, and would urge the reader simply to think of any given
amount as so many pieces of money.
References to Sources
Sources will be found in the Bibliography and, for a particular item,
in the Reference Notes at the end of the book, located by page
number and an identifying phrase from the text.

Part One

Chapter 1

F
“I Am the Sire de Coucy”: The Dynasty
ormidable and grand on a hilltop in Picardy, the ve-towered
castle of Coucy dominated the approach to Paris from the
north, but whether as guardian or as challenger of the
monarchy in the capital was an open question. Thrusting up
from the castle’s center, a gigantic cylinder rose to twice the height
of the four corner towers. This was the donjon or central citadel, the
largest in Europe, the mightiest of its kind ever built in the Middle
Ages or thereafter. Ninety feet in diameter, 180 feet high, capable of
housing a thousand men in a siege, it dwarfed and protected the
castle at its base, the clustered roofs of the town, the bell tower of
the church, and the thirty turrets of the massive wall enclosing the
whole complex on the hill. Travelers coming from any direction
could see this colossus of baronial power from miles away and, on
approaching it, feel the awe of the traveler in indel lands at rst
sight of the pyramids.
Seized by grandeur, the builders had carried out the scale of the
donjon in interior features of more than mortal size: risers of steps
were fteen to sixteen inches, window seats three and a half feet
from the ground, as if for use by a race of titans. Stone lintels
measuring two cubic yards were no less heroic. For more than four
hundred years the dynasty reected by these arrangements had
exhibited the same quality of excess. Ambitious, dangerous, not
infrequently ferocious, the Coucys had planted themselves on a
promontory of land which was formed by nature for command.
Their hilltop controlled passage through the valley of the Ailette to
the greater valley of the Oise. From here they had challenged kings,
despoiled the Church, departed for and died on crusades, been
condemned and excommunicated for crimes, progressively enlarged
their domain, married royalty, and nurtured a pride that took for its

battle cry, “Coucy à la merveille!” Holding one of the four great
baronies of France, they scorned territorial titles and adopted their
motto of simple arrogance,
Roi ne suis,
Ne prince ne duc ne comte aussi;
Je suis le sire de Coucy.
(Not king nor prince,
Duke nor count am I;
I am the lord of Coucy.)
Begun in 1223, the castle was a product of the same architectural
explosion that raised the great cathedrals whose impulse, too,
sprang from northern France. Four of the greatest were under
construction, at the same time as the castle—at Laon, Reims,
Amiens, and Beauvais, within fty miles of Coucy. While it took
anywhere from 50 to 150 years to nish building a cathedral, the
vast works of Coucy with donjon, towers, ramparts, and
subterranean network were completed, under the single compelling
will of Enguerrand de Coucy III, in the astonishing space of seven
years.
The castle compound enclosed a space of more than two acres. Its
four corner towers, each 90 feet high and 65 in diameter, and its
three outer sides were built ush with the edge of the hill, forming
the ramparts. The only entrance to the compound was a fortied
gate on the inner side next to the donjon, protected by guard towers,
moat, and portcullis. The gate opened onto the place d’armes, a
walled space of about six acres, containing stables and other service
buildings, tiltyard, and pasture for the knights’ horses. Beyond this,
where the hill widened out like the tail of a sh, lay the town of
perhaps a hundred houses and a square-towered church. Three
fortied gates in the outer wall encircling the hilltop commanded
access to the outside world. On the south side facing Soissons, the
hill fell away in a steep, easily defensible slope; on the north facing

Laon, where the hill merged with the plateau, a great moat made an
added barrier.
Within walls eighteen to thirty feet thick, a spiral staircase
connected the three stories of the donjon. An open hole or “eye” in
the roof, repeated in the vaulted ceiling of each level, added a little
extra light and air to the gloom, and enabled arms and provisions to
be hoisted from oor to oor without the necessity of climbing the
stairs. By the same means, orders could be given vocally to the
entire garrison at one time. As many as 1,200 to 1,500 men-at-arms
could assemble to hear what was said from the middle level. The
donjon had kitchens, said an awed contemporary, “worthy of Nero,”
and a rainwater shpond on the roof. It had a well, bread ovens,
cellars, storerooms, huge replaces with chimneys on each oor,
and latrines. Vaulted underground passageways led to every part of
the castle, to the open court, and to secret exits outside the
ramparts, through which a besieged garrison could be provisioned.
From the top of the donjon an observer could see the whole region
as far as the forest of Compiègne thirty miles away, making Coucy
proof against surprise. In design and execution the fortress was the
most nearly perfect military structure of medieval Europe, and in
size the most audacious.
One governing concept shaped a castle: not residence, but
defense. As fortress, it was an emblem of medieval life as
dominating as the cross. In the Romance of the Rose, that vast
compendium of everything but romance, the castle enclosing the
Rose is the central structure, which must be besieged and penetrated
to reach the goal of sexual desire. In real life, all its arrangements
testied to the fact of violence, the expectation of attack, which had
carved the history of the Middle Ages. The castle’s predecessor, the
Roman villa, had been unfortied, depending on Roman law and the
Roman legions for its ramparts. After the Empire’s collapse, the
medieval society that emerged was a set of disjointed and clashing
parts subject to no central or eective secular authority. Only the
Church oered an organizing principle, which was the reason for its
success, for society cannot bear anarchy.

Out of the turbulence, central secular authority began slowly to
cohere in the monarchy, but as soon as the new power became
eective it came into conict with the Church on the one hand and
the barons on the other. Simultaneously the bourgeois of the towns
were developing their own order and selling their support to barons,
bishops, or kings in return for charters of liberties as free
“communes.” By providing the freedom for the development of
commerce, the charters marked the rise of the urban Third Estate.
Political balance among the competing groups was unstable because
the king had no permanent armed force at his command. He had to
rely on the feudal obligation of his vassals to perform limited
military service, later supplemented by paid service. Rule was still
personal, deriving from the ef of land and oath of homage. Not
citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay
political structure. The state was still struggling to be born.
By virtue of its location in the center of Picardy, the domain of
Coucy, as the crown acknowledged, was “one of the keys of the
kingdom.” Reaching almost to Flanders in the north and to the
Channel and borders of Normandy on the west, Picardy was the
main avenue of northern France. Its rivers led both southward to the
Seine and westward to the Channel. Its fertile soil made it the
primary agricultural region of France, with pasture and elds of
grain, clumps of forest, and a comfortable sprinkling of villages.
Clearing, the rst act of civilization, had started with the Romans.
At the opening of the 14th century Picardy supported about 250,000
households or a population of more than a million, making it the
only province of France, other than Toulouse in the south, to have
been more populous in medieval times than in modern. Its temper
was vigorous and independent, its towns the earliest to win charters
as communes.
In the shadowed region between legend and history, the domain
of Coucy was originally a ef of the Church supposedly bestowed on
St. Remi, rst Bishop of Reims, by Clovis, rst Christian King of the
Franks, in about the year 500. After his conversion to Christianity

by St. Remi, King Clovis gave the territory of Coucy to the new
bishopric of Reims, grounding the Church in the things of Caesar, as
the Emperor Constantine had traditionally grounded the Church of
Rome. By Constantine’s gift, Christianity was both ocially
established and fatally compromised. As William Langland wrote,
When the kindness of Constantine gave Holy Church endowments
In lands and leases, lordships and servants,
The Romans heard an angel cry on high above them,
“This day dos ecclesiae has drunk venom
And all who have Peter’s power are poisoned forever.”
That conict between the reach for the divine and the lure of
earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. The
claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made
wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in
material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more
visible and disturbing became the aw; nor could it ever be
resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every
century.
In the earliest Latin documents, Coucy was called Codiciacum or
Codiacum, supposedly derived from Codex, codicis, meaning a tree
trunk stripped of its branches such as those the Gauls used to build
their palisades. For four centuries through the Dark Ages the place
remained in shadow. In 910–20 Hervé, Archbishop of Reims, built
the rst primitive castle and chapel on the hill, surrounded by a
wall as defense against Norsemen invading the valley of the Oise.
Settlers from the village below, taking refuge within the Bishop’s
walls, founded the upper town, which came to be known as Coucy-
le-Château, as distinguished from Coucy-la-Ville below. In those
erce times the territory was a constant bone of conict among
barons, archbishops, and kings, all equally bellicose. Defense against
invaders—Moors in the south, Norsemen in the north—had bred a
class of hard-bitten warriors who fought among themselves as
willingly and savagely as against outsiders. In 975 Oderic,
Archbishop of Reims, ceded the ef to a personage called the Comte

d’Eudes, who became the rst lord of Coucy. Nothing is known of
this individual except his name, but once established on the hilltop,
he produced in his descendants a strain of extraordinary strength
and fury.
The dynasty’s rst recorded act of signicance, religious rather
than bellicose, was the founding by Aubry de Coucy in 1059 of the
Benedictine Abbey of Nogent at the foot of the hill. Such a gesture,
on a larger scale than the usual donation for perpetual prayers, was
meant both to display the importance of the donor and to buy merit
to assure his salvation. Whether or not the initial endowment was
meager, as the monastery’s rancorous Abbot Guibert complained in
the next century, the abbey ourished and, supported by a ow of
funds from successive Coucys, outlived them all.
Aubry’s successor, Enguerrand I, was a man of many scandals,
obsessed by lust for women, according to Abbot Guibert (himself a
victim of repressed sexuality, as revealed in his Confessions). Seized
by a passion for Sybil, wife of a lord of Lorraine, Enguerrand
succeeded, with the aid of a compliant Bishop of Laon who was his
rst cousin, in divorcing his rst wife, Adèle de Marie, on charges of
adultery. Afterward he married Sybil with the sanction of the
Church while her husband was absent at war and while the lady
herself was pregnant as the result of still a third liaison. She was
said to be of dissolute morals.
Out of this vicious family situation came that “raging wolf” (in
the words of another famous abbot, Suger of St. Denis), the most
notorious and savage of the Coucys, Thomas de Marie, son of the
repudiated Adèle. Bitterly hating the father who had cast his
paternity in doubt, Thomas grew up to take part in the ceaseless war
originally launched against Enguerrand I by the discarded husband
of Sybil. These private wars were fought by the knights with furious
gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the
enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying
as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as
possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the
chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry. Abbot
Guibert claimed that in the “mad war” of Enguerrand against the

Lorrainer, captured men had their eyes put out and feet cut o with
results that could still be seen in the district in his time. The private
wars were the curse of Europe which the crusades, it has been
thought, were subconsciously invented to relieve by providing a
vent for aggression.
When the great summons of 1095 came to take the cross and save
the Holy Sepulcher on the First Crusade, both Enguerrand I and his
son Thomas joined the march, carrying their feud to Jerusalem and
back with mutual hate undiminished. From an exploit during the
crusade the Coucy coat-of-arms derived, although whether the
protagonist was Enguerrand or Thomas is disputed. One or the other
with ve companions, on being surprised by a party of Moslems
when out of armor, took o his scarlet cloak trimmed with vair
(squirrel fur), tore it into six pieces to make banners for recognition,
and thus equipped, so the story goes, fell upon the Moslems and
annihilated them. In commemoration a shield was adopted bearing
the device of six horizontal bands, pointed, of red on white, or in
heraldic terms, “Barry of six, vair and gules” (gules meaning red).
As his mother’s heir to the territories of Marie and La Fère,
Thomas added them to the Coucy domain to which he succeeded in
1116. Untamed, he pursued a career of enmity and brigandage,
directed in varying combinations against Church, town, and King,
“the Devil aiding him,” according to Abbot Suger. He seized manors
from convents, tortured prisoners (reportedly hanging men up by
their testicles until these tore o from the weight of the body),
personally cut the throats of thirty rebellious bourgeois, transformed
his castles into “a nest of dragons and a cave of thieves,” and was
excommunicated by the Church, which ungirdled him—in absentia
—of the knightly belt and ordered the anathema to be read against
him every Sunday in every parish in Picardy. King Louis VI
assembled a force for war upon Thomas and succeeded in divesting
him of stolen lands and castles. In the end, Thomas was not proof
against that hope of salvation and fear of hell which brought the
Church so many rich legacies through the centuries. He left a
generous bequest to the Abbey of Nogent, founded another abbey at
Prémontré nearby, and died in bed in 1130. He had been married

three times. Abbot Guibert thought him “the wickedest man of his
generation.”
What formed a man like Thomas de Marie was not necessarily
aggressive genes or father-hatred, which can occur in any century,
but a habit of violence that ourished because of a lack of any organ
of eective restraint.
While political power centralized during the 12th and 13th
centuries, the energies and talents of Europe were gathering in one
of civilization’s great bursts of development. Stimulated by
commerce, a surge took place in art, technology, building, learning,
exploration by land and sea, universities, cities, banking and credit,
and every sphere that enriched life and widened horizons. Those
200 years were the High Middle Ages, a period that brought into use
the compass and mechanical clock, the spinning wheel and treadle
loom, the windmill and watermill; a period when Marco Polo
traveled to China and Thomas Aquinas set himself to organize
knowledge, when universities were established at Paris, Bologna,
Padua, and Naples, Oxford and Cambridge, Salamanca and
Valladolid, Montpellier and Toulouse; when Giotto painted human
feeling, Roger Bacon delved into experimental science, Dante
framed his great design of human fate and wrote it in the
vernacular; a period when religion was expressed both in the gentle
preaching of St. Francis and in the cruelty of the Inquisition, when
the Albigensian Crusade in the name of faith drenched southern
France in blood and massacre while the soaring cathedrals rose arch
upon arch, triumphs of creativity, technology, and faith.
They were not built by slave labor. Though limited serfdom
existed, the rights and duties of serfs were xed by custom and legal
memory, and the work of medieval society, unlike that of the
ancient world, was done by its own members.
At Coucy after the death of Thomas, a sixty-year period of more
respectable lordship followed under his son and grandson,
Enguerrand II and Raoul I, who cooperated with the crown to the
benet of their domain. Each responded to the renewed crusades of

the 12th century, and each in turn lost his life in the Holy Land.
Perhaps suering from nancial stringency imposed by these
expeditions, the widow of Raoul sold to Coucy-le-Château in 1197
its charter of liberties as a free commune for 140 livres.
Such democratization, as far as it went, was not so much a step in
a steady march toward liberty—as 19th century historians liked to
envision the human record—as it was the inadvertent by-product of
the nobles’ passionate pursuit of war. Required to equip himself and
his retainers with arms, armor, and sound horses, all of them costly,
the crusader—if he survived—usually came home poorer than he
went, or left his estate poorer, especially since none of the crusades
after the First was either victorious or lucrative. The only recourse,
since it was unthinkable to sell land, was to sell communal
privileges or commute labor services and bonds of serfdom for a
money rent. In the expanding economy of the 12th and 13th
centuries, the prots of commerce and agricultural surplus brought
burghers and peasants the cash to pay for rights and liberties.
In Enguerrand III, called “the Great,” builder of the reconstructed
castle and donjon, the excess of the Coucys appeared again. Seigneur
from 1191 to 1242, he built or reconstructed castles and ramparts
on six of his efs in addition to Coucy, including one at St. Gobain
almost as large as that of Coucy. He took part in the slaughter of the
Albigensian Crusade, fought in every other available war including,
like his great-grandfather Thomas, one against the diocese of Reims
growing out of a quarrel over feudal rights. He was accused of
having pillaged its lands, cut down its trees, seized its villages,
forced the doors of the cathedral, imprisoned the doyen in chains,
and reduced the canons to misery.
When the Archbishop of Reims complained to the Pope in 1216,
Enguerrand III too was excommunicated and all religious services in
the diocese were ordered to be terminated if he should appear. A
person under the ban was deprived of the sacraments and doomed
to hell until such time as he made amendment and was absolved. In
major cases only the bishop or in some cases the Pope could lift the
ban. While it was in force the local priest was supposed to

pronounce the curse upon the sinner before the parish two or three
times a year in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Virgin
Mary, and all the Apostles and saints while the funeral knell tolled,
candles were put out, and the cross and missals laid on the oor.
Supposedly the guilty one was cut o from all social and
occupational relationships, but the inconveniences for everyone
resulting from this rule were such that his neighbors either resorted
to throwing stones at his house or other measures to bring him to
repentance, or ignored the ban. In Enguerrand III’s case the
cessation of all religious services was a fearful sentence upon the
community, which brought him to settlement and absolution in
1219 after he had performed penance. But it did nothing to quench
his civil ambitions, for he went on to build the great castle that cast
its shadow over Paris.
His urgency in the construction was stimulated by expectation of
a battle with his sovereign, for during the minority of Louis IX, the
future St. Louis, Enguerrand III led a league of barons in opposition
to the crown; even, as some say, aspired to the throne himself. He
had inherited royal blood through his mother, Alix de Dreux, a
descendant of Philip I. His donjon, designed to surpass the royal
tower of the Louvre, was taken as a gesture of deance and intent.
The regency of the boy King’s mother withstood the threat, but the
Sire de Coucy remained a force to reckon with. He piled on property
and international standing through marriages. His rst and third
wives were women of neighboring noble families who brought him
additional estates in Picardy, and his second wife was Mahaut de
Saxe, daughter of Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, granddaughter of
Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, niece of Richard the
Lion-hearted, and sister of Otto of Saxony, subsequently Holy
Roman Emperor. His daughter by one of these wives married
Alexander II, King of Scotland.
In the constructions at Coucy he employed (as estimated from
masons’ marks) about 800 stonemasons, uncounted oxcarts to drag
the stones from quarries to the hill, and some 800 other craftsmen
such as carpenters, roofers, iron and lead workers, painters, and
wood-carvers. Over the doorway of the donjon was carved in bas-

relief the statue of an unarmored knight in combat with a lion,
symbolizing chivalric courage. Walls of both castle and keep were
decorated with painted borders and garlands of fantastic leaves, all
on a scale to match the structure. Manteled chimneys, built into the
walls, were a feature in every part of the castle. As distinct from a
hole in the roof, these chimneys were a technological advance of the
11th century that by warming individual rooms, brought lords and
ladies out of the common hall where all had once eaten together
and gathered for warmth, and separated owners from their
retainers. No other invention brought more progress in comfort and
renement, although at the cost of a widening social gulf.
Tucked into an interior angle of the second story was a small
room with its own chimney, perhaps a boudoir for the Dame de
Coucy, where from the window she could see a view stretching over
the valley with here and there the bell tower of a village church
poking up behind a clump of trees, and where, like the lady of
Shalott, she could watch the people come and go on the road
winding up from below. Except for this tiny chamber, the living
quarters of the seigneur and his family were in that part of the
castle least accessible from outside.
In 1206 the citizens of Amiens, Picardy’s proud and prosperous
capital, already a commune for a hundred years, acquired a piece of
John the Baptist’s head. As a tting shrine for the relic, they
determined to build the largest church in France, “higher than all
the saints, higher than all the kings.” By 1220, resources having
been gathered, the noble vault of the cathedral was steadily rising.
Within the same decade Enguerrand III built, alongside his donjon, a
grandiose and magnicent chapel, larger than the Sainte Chapelle
that St. Louis was to build in Paris a few years later. Vaulted and
gilded and rich in carving and color, it glowed with stained-glass
windows so beautiful that the greatest collector of the next century,
Jean, Duc de Berry, tried to buy them for 12,000 gold écus.
Enguerrand III was now seigneur of St. Gobain, of Assis, of Marie,
of La Fère, of Folembray, of Montmirail, of Oisy, of Crèvecoeur, of
La Ferté-Aucoul and La Ferté-Gauche, Viscount of Meaux, Castellan
de Cambrai. Long ago in 1095 the crown had retrieved sovereignty

over the ef of Coucy from the Church; it was now held directly of
the King, and its seigneur paid homage only to the King’s person.
During the 12th and 13th centuries the seigneur of Coucy, like the
Bishop of Laon, coined his own money. Judged by the number of
knights that royal vassals were obligated to provide at the King’s
summons, Coucy at this time was the leading untitled barony of the
realm, ranking immediately behind the great dukedoms and
counties which, except for homage owed to the French King, were
virtually independent lordships. According to a record of 1216, the
domain of Coucy owed 30 knights, in comparison to 34 for the Duke
of Anjou, 36 for the Duke of Brittany, and 47 for the Count of
Flanders.
In 1242 Enguerrand III was killed at the age of about sixty when
in a violent fall from his horse the point of his sword was thrust
through his body. His eldest son and successor, Raoul II, was soon
afterward killed in battle in Egypt while on St. Louis’ unhappy
crusade of 1248–50. He was succeeded by his brother Enguerrand
IV, a kind of medieval Caligula, one of whose crimes became the
catalyst of a major advance in social justice.
On apprehending in his forest three young squires of Laon,
equipped with bows and arrows but no hunting dogs for taking
important game, Enguerrand IV had them executed by hanging,
without trial or process of any kind. Impunity in such aairs was no
longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign
whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety. He had Enguerrand
IV arrested, not by his peers but by sergents of the court, like any
criminal, and imprisoned in the Louvre, although, in deference to
his rank, not in chains.
Summoned to trial in 1256, Enguerrand IV was accompanied by
the greatest peers of the realm—the King of Navarre, the Duke of
Burgundy, the Counts of Bar and Soissons among others, grimly
sensing a test of their prerogatives. Refusing to submit to
investigation of the case as touching his person, honor, rank, and
noble heritage, Enguerrand demanded judgment by his peers and
trial by combat. Louis IX rmly refused, saying that as regards the
poor, the clergy, “and persons who deserve our pity,” it would be

unjust to allow trial by combat. Customarily, non-nobles could
engage a champion in such cases, but King Louis saw the method as
obsolete. In a long and ercely argued process, against the strenuous
resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial.
Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a
death sentence, he was persuaded by the peers to forgo it.
Enguerrand was sentenced to pay a ne of 12,000 livres, to be used
partly to endow masses in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had
hanged, and partly to be sent to Acre to aid in the defense of the
Holy Land. Legal history was made and later cited as a factor in the
canonization of the King.
The Coucy riches restored Enguerrand IV to royal favor when he
lent King Louis 15,000 livres in 1265 to buy what was supposed to
be the True Cross. Otherwise he continued a career of outrages into
the 14th century and died at the ripe age of 75 in 1311, without
issue though not without a bequest. He left 20 sous (equal to one
livre) a year in perpetuity to the leprosarium of Coucy-la-Ville so
that its inmates “will pray for us each year in the Chapel for our
sins.” Twenty sous at this time was equal to a day’s pay of one
knight or four archers, or the hire of a cart and two horses for
twenty days, or, theoretically, the pay of a hired peasant for two
years, so it may be presumed to have underwritten a reasonable
number of prayers, though perhaps not adequate for the soul of
Enguerrand IV.
When that unlamented lord, though twice married, died without
heirs, the dynasty passed to the descendants of his sister Alix, who
was married to the Count of Guînes. Her eldest son inherited the
Guînes lands and title, while her second son, Enguerrand V, became
the lord of Coucy. Raised at the court of Alexander of Scotland, his
uncle by marriage, he married Catherine Lindsay of Baliol, the
King’s niece, and held the seigneury only ten years. He was followed
in rapid succession by his son Guillaume and his grandson
Enguerrand VI, who inherited the domain in 1335 and ve years
later was to father Enguerrand VII, last of the Coucys and the
subject of this book. Through further marriages with powerful
families of northern France and Flanders, the Coucys had continued

to weave alliances of strength and inuence and acquire lands,
revenues, and a galaxy of armorial bearings in the process. They
could display as many as twelve coats-of-arms: Boisgency, Hainault,
Dreux, Saxony, Montmirail, Roucy, Baliol, Ponthieu, Châtillon, St.
Pol, Gueldres, and Flanders.
The Coucys maintained a sense of eminence second to none, and
conducted their aairs after the usage of sovereign princes. They
held courts of justice in the royal style and organized their
household under the same ocers as the King’s: a constable, a
grand butler, a master of falconry and the hunt, a master of the
stables, a master of forests and waters, and masters or grand
stewards of kitchen, bakery, cellar, fruit (which included spices, and
torches and candles for lighting), and furnishings (including tapestry
and lodgings during travel). A grand seigneur of this rank also
usually employed one or more resident physicians, barbers, priests,
painters, musicians, minstrels, secretaries and copyists, an
astrologer, a jester, and a dwarf, besides pages and squires. A
principal vassal acting as châtelain or garde du château managed the
estate. At Coucy fty knights, together with their own squires,
attendants, and servants, made up a permanent garrison of 500.
Outward magnicence was important as a statement of status,
requiring huge retinues dressed in the lord’s livery, spectacular
feasts, tournaments, hunts, entertainments, and above all an open-
handed liberality in gifts and expenditure which, since his followers
lived o it, was extolled as the most admired attribute of a noble.
The status of nobility derived from birth and ancestry, but had to
be conrmed by “living nobly”—that is, by the sword. A person was
noble if born of noble parents and grandparents and so on back to
the rst armed horseman. In practice the rule was porous and the
status uid and inexact. The one certain criterion was function—
namely, the practice of arms. This was the function assigned to the
second of the three estates established by God, each with a given
task for the good of the whole. The clergy were to pray for all men,
the knight to ght for them, and the commoner to work that all
might eat.

As being nearest to God, the clergy came rst. They were divided
between two hierarchies, the cloistered and secular, meaning in the
latter case those whose mission was among the laity. Presiding over
both hierarchies were the prelates—abbots, bishops, and
archbishops, who were the equivalent of the secular grands seigneurs.
Between the prelacy and the poor half-educated priest living on a
crumb and a pittance there was little in common. The Third Estate
was even less homogeneous, being divided between employers and
workers and covering the whole range of great urban magnates,
lawyers and doctors, skilled craftsmen, day laborers, and peasants.
Nevertheless, the nobility insisted on lumping all non-nobles
together as a common breed. “Of the good towns, merchants and
working men,” wrote a noble at the court of the last Duke of
Burgundy, “no long description is necessary, for, among other
things, this estate is not capable of great attributes because it is of
servile degree.”
The object of the noble’s function, in theory, was not ghting for
ghting’s sake, but defense of the two other estates and the
maintenance of justice and order. He was supposed to protect the
people from oppression, to combat tyranny, and to cultivate virtue
—that is, the higher qualities of humanity of which the mud-stained
ignorant peasant was considered incapable by his contemporaries in
Christianity, if not by its founder.
In his capacity as protector, the noble earned exemption from
direct taxation by poll or hearth-tax, although not from the aids or
sales taxes. These, however, took proportionately more from the
poor than from the rich. The assumption was that taxpaying was
ignoble; the knight’s sword arm provided his service to the state, as
prayers provided the clergy’s and exempted them too from the
hearth-tax. Justication for the nobles lay in the “exposure of their
bodies and property in war,” but in practice the rules were as
changeable and diuse as clouds in a windy sky. The tax status of
the clergy, too, when it came to money for the defense of the realm,
was the subject of chronic and erce dispute.
Taxation like usury rested on principles that were anything but
clearly dened and so muddled by ad hoc additions, exemptions,

and arrangements that it was impossible to count on a denite
amount of returns. The basic principle was that the King should
“live of his own” under ordinary circumstances, but since his own
revenues might not suce for defense of the realm or other
governmental purposes, his subjects could be taxed to enable him,
as Thomas Aquinas neatly phrased it, “to provide for the common
good from the common goods.” This obligation derived from the
deeper principle that “princes are instituted by God not to seek their
own gain but the common good of the people.”
A man born to the noble estate clung to the sword as the sign of
his identity, not only for the sake of tax-exemption but for self-
image. “Not one of us had a father who died at home,” insisted a
knight in a 13th century chanson de geste; “all have died in the battle
of cold steel.”
The horse was the seat of the noble, the mount that lifted him
above other men. In every language except English, the word for
knight—chevalier in French—meant the man on horseback. “A brave
man mounted on a good horse,” it was acknowledged, “can do more
in an hour of ghting than ten or maybe one hundred could do
afoot.” The destrier or war-horse was bred to be “strong, ery, swift,
and faithful” and ridden only in combat. En route the knight rode
his palfrey, high-bred but of quieter disposition, while his squire led
the destrier at his right hand—hence its name, from dexter. In
fullling military service, horse and knight were considered
inseparable; without a mount the knight was a mere man.
Battle was his exaltation. “If I had one foot already in Paradise,”
exclaimed Garin li Loherains, the hero of a chanson de geste, “I
would withdraw it to go and ght!” The troubadour Bertrand de
Born, himself a noble, was more explicit.
My heart is lled with gladness when I see
Strong castles besieged, stockades broken and overwhelmed,
Many vassals struck down,
Horses of the dead and wounded roving at random.
And when battle is joined, let all men of good lineage
Think of naught but the breaking of heads and arms,

For it is better to die than be vanquished and live.…
I tell you I have no such joy as when I hear the shout
“On! On!” from both sides and the neighing of riderless steeds,
And groans of “Help me! Help me!”
And when I see both great and small
Fall in the ditches and on the grass
And see the dead transxed by spear shafts!
Lords, mortgage your domains, castles, cities,
But never give up war!
Dante pictured Bertrand in Hell, carrying his severed head before
him as a lantern.
From ownership of land and revenues the noble derived the right
to exercise authority over all non-nobles of his territory except the
clergy and except merchants who were citizens of a free town. The
grand seigneur’s authority extended to “high justice,” meaning the
power of life or death, while the lesser knight’s was limited to
prison, ogging, and other punishments of “low justice.” Its basis
and justication remained the duty to protect, as embodied in the
lord’s oath to his vassals, which was as binding in theory as theirs to
him—and theirs was binding “only so long as the lord keeps his
oath.” Medieval political structure was ideally a contract exchanging
service and loyalty in return for protection, justice, and order. As
the peasant owed produce and labor, the lord in turn owed
ministerial service to his overlord or sovereign, and counsel in peace
as well as military service in war. Land in all cases was the
consideration, and the oath of homage, made and accepted, was the
seal binding both sides, including kings.
Not all nobles were grands seigneurs like the Coucys. A bachelor
knight, possessor of one manor and a bony nag, shared the same
cult but not the interests of a territorial lord. The total ranks of the
nobility in France numbered about 200,000 persons in 40,000 to
50,000 families who represented something over one percent of the
population. They ranged from the great dukedoms with revenues of
more than 10,000 livres, down through the lord of a minor castle
with one or two knights as vassals and an income under 500 livres,

to the poor knight at the bottom of the scale who was lord of no one
except those of servile birth and whose only ef was a house and a
few elds equivalent to a peasant’s holding. He might have an
income from a few rents of 25 livres or less, which had to support
family and servants and the knight’s equipment that was his
livelihood. He lived by horse and arms, dependent for maintenance
on his overlord or whoever needed his services.
A squire belonged to the nobility by birth whether or not he
obtained the belt and spurs of a knight, but legal process was often
required to determine what other functions a gentleman might
undertake without losing noble status. Could he sell wine from his
vineyard, for instance?—a delicate question because the kings
regularly sold theirs. In a case brought in 1393 to determine this
question, a royal ordinance stated rather ambiguously, “It is not
proper for a noble to be an innkeeper.” According to another
judgment, a noble could acquire license to trade without losing his
status. Sons of noble fathers were known “who live and have long
lived as merchants selling cloth, grain, wine and all other things of
merchandise, or as tradesmen, furriers, shoemakers or tailors,” but
such activities would doubtless have lost them the privileges of a
noble.
The rationale of the problem was made plain by Honoré Bonet, a
14th century cleric who made the brave attempt in his Tree of
Battles to set forth existing codes of military conduct. The reason for
the prohibition of commercial activity, he wrote, was to ensure that
the knight “shall have no cause to leave the practice of arms for the
desire of acquiring worldly riches.”
Denition increasingly concerned the born nobles in proportion as
their status was diluted by the ennoblement of outsiders. Like the
grant of charters to towns, the grant of efs to commoners, who
paid handsomely for the honor, was found by the crown to be a
lucrative source of funds. The ennobled were men of fortune who
procured the king’s needs, or they were lawyers and notaries who
had started by assisting the king at various levels in the
administration of nance and justice and gradually, as the business
of government grew more complex, created a group of professional

civil servants and ministers of the crown. Called noblesse de la robe
when elevated, as distinguished from nobility of the sword, they
were scorned as parvenus by the ancestral nobles, who resented the
usurping of their right of counsel, lost more or less by default.
In consequence, the heraldic coat-of-arms—outward sign of
ancestry signifying the right to bear arms, which, once granted to a
family, could be worn by no other—came to be an object almost of
cult worship. At tournaments its display was required as evidence of
noble ancestry; at some tournaments four were required. As
penetration by outsiders increased, so did snobbery until a day in
the mid-15th century when a knight rode into the lists followed by a
parade of pennants bearing no less than 32 coats-of-arms.
Through disappearance by failure to produce a male heir or by
sinking over the edge into the lower classes, and through inow of
the ennobled, the personnel of the nobility was in ux, even though
the status was xed as an order of society. The disappearance rate of
noble families has been estimated at 50 percent a century, and the
average duration of a dynasty at three to six generations over a
period from 100 to 200 years. An example of the sinking process
occurred in a family called Clusel with a small ef in the Loire
valley. In 1276 it was headed by a knight evidently of too small
resources to maintain himself in arms, who was reduced to the non-
noble necessity of tilling his elds and operating his mill with his
own hands. Of three grandsons appearing in local records, one was
still a squire, one had become a parish priest, and the third a rent-
collector for the lord of the county. After a passage of 85 years no
member of the lineage was any longer referred to as a noble. In the
case of another squire named Guichard Vert, who died as a young
man in 1287, the family hovered on the edge. Guichard left two
beds, three blankets, four bedsheets, two small rugs, one table, three
benches, ve coers, two hams and a haunch of bacon in the larder,
ve empty barrels in the cellar, a chessboard, and a helmet and
lance but no sword. Though without cash, he willed 200 livres to his
wife to be paid in ten installments from his revenues of about 60
livres a year, and other income to found a chantry for his soul. He
bequeathed gifts of cloth to friends and to the poor, and remitted

two years’ tax to his tenants, most of whom were already in arrears.
Such a family, in physical conditions hardly distinguishable from a
commoner’s, would strain to keep its ties to the nobility, sending
sons to take service as squires so that they might have access to gifts
and pensions, or to enter the clergy in the hope of taking one of its
many paths to riches.
A knight on the way down might pass an enterprising peasant on
his way up. Having bought or inherited his freedom, a rent-paying
peasant who prospered would add elds and tenants of his own,
gradually leave manual labor to servants, acquire a ef from lord or
Church, learn the practice of arms, marry the daughter of a needy
squire, and slowly assimilate upward until he appeared in the
records as domicellus, or squire, himself. The baili in the lord’s
service had greater opportunities to make himself rich and, if he had
also made himself useful, was often rewarded by a ef with vassals
and rents, perhaps also a fortied manor. He would begin to dress
like a noble, wear a sword, keep hunting dogs and falcons, and ride
a war-horse carrying shield and lance. Nothing was more resented
by the hereditary nobles than the imitation of their clothes and
manners by the upstarts, thus obscuring the lines between the
eternal orders of society. Magnicence in clothes was considered a
prerogative of the nobles, who should be identiable by modes of
dress forbidden to others. In the eort to establish this principle as
law and prevent “outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people
against their estate and degree,” sumptuary laws were repeatedly
announced, attempting to x what kinds of clothes people might
wear and how much they might spend.
Proclaimed by criers in the county courts and public assemblies,
exact gradations of fabric, color, fur trimming, ornaments, and
jewels were laid down for every rank and income level. Bourgeois
might be forbidden to own a carriage or wear ermine, and peasants
to wear any color but black or brown. Florence allowed doctors and
magistrates to share the nobles’ privilege of ermine, but ruled out
for merchants’ wives multicolored, striped, and checked gowns,
brocades, gured velvets, and fabrics embroidered in silver and
gold. In France territorial lords and their ladies with incomes of

6,000 livres or more could order four costumes a year; knights and
bannerets with incomes of 3,000 could have three a year, one of
which had to be for summer. Boys could have only one a year, and
no demoiselle who was not the châtelaine of a castle or did not have
an income of 2,000 livres could order more than one costume a
year. In England, according to a law of 1363, a merchant worth
£1,000 was entitled to the same dress and meals as a knight worth
£500, and a merchant worth £200 the same as a knight worth £100.
Double wealth in this case equaled nobility. Eorts were also made
to regulate how many dishes could be served at meals, what
garments and linens could be accumulated for a trousseau, how
many minstrels at a wedding party. In the passion for xing and
stabilizing identity, prostitutes were required to wear stripes, or
garments turned inside out.
Servants who imitated the long pointed shoes and hanging sleeves
of their betters were severely disapproved, more because of their
pretensions than because their sleeves slopped into the broth when
they waited on table and their fur-trimmed hems trailed in the dirt.
“There was so much pride amongst the common people,” wrote the
English chronicler Henry Knighton, “in vying with one another in
dress and ornaments that it was scarce possible to distinguish the
poor from the rich, the servant from the master, or a priest from
other men.”
Expenditure of money by commoners pained the nobles not least
because they saw it beneting the merchant class rather than
themselves. The clergy considered that this expenditure drained
money from the Church, and so condemned it on the moral ground
that extravagance and luxury were in themselves wicked and
harmful to virtue. In general, the sumptuary laws were favored as a
means of curbing extravagance and promoting thrift, in the belief
that if people could be made to save money, the King could obtain it
when necessary. Economic thinking did not embrace the idea of
spending as a stimulus to the economy.
The sumptuary laws proved unenforceable; the prerogative of
adornment, like the drinking of liquor in a later century, deed
prohibition. When Florentine city ocials pursued women in the

streets to examine their gowns, and entered houses to search their
wardrobes, their ndings were often spectacular: cloth of white
marbled silk embroidered with vine leaves and red grapes, a coat
with white and red roses on a pale yellow ground, another coat of
“blue cloth with white lilies and white and red stars and compasses
and white and yellow stripes across it, lined with red striped cloth,”
which almost seemed as if the owner were trying to see how far
deance could go.
To the grands seigneurs of multiple efs and castles, identity was
no problem. In their gold-embossed surcoats and velvet mantles
lined in ermine, their slashed and parti-colored tunics embroidered
with family crest or verses or a lady-love’s initials, their hanging
scalloped sleeves with colored linings, their long pointed shoes of
red leather from Cordova, their rings and chamois gloves and belts
hung with bells and trinkets, their innity of hats—pued tam-
o’shanters and furred caps, hoods and brims, chaplets of owers,
coiled turbans, coverings of every shape, pued, pleated, scalloped,
or curled into a long tailed pocket called a liripipe—they were
beyond imitation.
When the 14th century opened, France was supreme. Her
superiority in chivalry, learning, and Christian devotion was taken
for granted, and as traditional champion of the Church, her
monarch was accorded the formula of “Most Christian King.” The
people of his realm considered themselves the chosen objects of
divine favor through whom God expressed his will on earth. The
classic French account of the First Crusade was entitled Gesta Dei per
Francos (God’s Deeds Done by the French). Divine favor was
conrmed in 1297 when, a bare quarter-century after his death,
France’s twice-crusading King, Louis IX, was canonized as a saint.
“The fame of French knights,” acknowledged Giraldus Cambrensis
in the 12th century, “dominates the world.” France was the land of
“well-conducted chivalry” where uncouth German nobles came to
learn good manners and taste at the courts of French princes, and
knights and sovereigns from all over Europe assembled at the royal

court to enjoy jousts and festivals and amorous gallantries.
Residence there, according to blind King John of Bohemia, who
preferred the French court to his own, oered “the most chivalrous
sojourn in the world.” The French, as described by the renowned
Spanish knight Don Pero Niño, “are generous and great givers of
presents.” They know how to treat strangers honorably, they praise
fair deeds, they are courteous and gracious in speech and “very gay,
giving themselves up to pleasure and seeking it. They are very
amorous, women as well as men, and proud of it.”
As a result of Norman conquests and the crusades, French was
spoken as a second mother tongue by the noble estate in England,
Flanders, and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily. It was used as the
language of business by Flemish magnates, by law courts in the
remnants of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by scholars and poets of
other lands. Marco Polo dictated his Travels in French, St. Francis
sang French songs, foreign troubadours modeled their tales of
adventure on the French chansons de geste. When a Venetian scholar
translated a Latin chronicle of his city into French rather than
Italian, he explained his choice on the ground that “the French
language is current throughout the world and more delightful to
hear and read than any other.”
The architecture of Gothic cathedrals was called the “French
style”; a French architect was invited to design London Bridge;
Venice imported dolls from France dressed in the latest mode in
order to keep up with French fashions; exquisitely carved French
ivories, easily transportable, penetrated to the limits of the Christian
world. Above all, the University of Paris elevated the name of the
French capital, surpassing all others in the fame of its masters and
the prestige of its studies in theology and philosophy, though these
were already petrifying in the rigid doctrines of Scholasticism. Its
faculty at the opening of the 14th century numbered over 500, its
students, attracted from all countries, were too numerous to count.
It was a magnet for the greatest minds: Thomas Aquinas of Italy
taught there in the 13th century, as did his own teacher Albertus
Magnus of Germany, his philosophical opponent Duns Scotus of
Scotland, and in the next century, the two great political thinkers,

Marsilius of Padua and the English Franciscan William of Ockham.
By virtue of the university, Paris was the “Athens of Europe”; the
Goddess of Wisdom, it was said, after leaving Greece and then
Rome, had made it her home.
The University’s charter of privileges, dating from 1200, was its
greatest pride. Exempted from civil control, the University was
equally haughty in regard to ecclesiastical authority, and always in
conict with Bishop and Pope. “You Paris masters at your desks
seem to think the world should be ruled by your reasonings,”
stormed the papal legate Benedict Caetani, soon to be Pope Boniface
VIII. “It is to us,” he reminded them, “that the world is entrusted,
not to you.” Unconvinced, the University considered itself as
authoritative in theology as the Pope, although conceding to Christ’s
Vicar equal status with itself as “the two lights of the world.”
In this favored land of the Western world, the Coucy inheritance
in 1335 was as rich as it was ancient. Watered by the Ailette, the
Coucys’ land was called the vallée d’or (golden valley) because of its
resources in timber, vineyards, grain crops, and a profusion of sh
in the streams. The magnicent forest of St. Gobain covered more
than 7,000 acres of primeval oak and beech, ash and birch, willow,
alder and quivering aspen, wild cherry and pine. The home of deer,
wolves, wild boar, heron, and every other bird, it was a paradise for
the hunt. From taxes and land rents and feudal dues of various kinds
increasingly converted to money, from tolls on bridges and fees for
use of the lord’s our mill, wine press, and bread ovens, the annual
revenue of an estate the size of Coucy would have been in the range
of 5,000 to 6,000 livres.
Everything that had formed the ef since the tree trunks at
Codiciacum was symbolized in the great lion platform of stone in
front of the castle gate where vassals came to present rents and
homage. The platform rested on three lions, couchant, one devouring
a child, one a dog, and in between them, a third, quiescent. On top
was a fourth lion seated in all the majesty the sculptor could evoke.
Three times a year—at Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas—the Abbot

of Nogent or his agent came to pay homage for the land originally
granted to the monks by Aubry de Coucy. The rituals of the
ceremony were as elaborate and abstruse as any in the royal
crowning at Reims.
Mounted on a bay horse (or, according to some accounts, a
palomino) with clipped tail and ears and a plow-horse’s harness, the
abbot’s representative carried a whip, a seed bag of wheat, and a
basket lled with 120 rissoles. These were crescent-shaped pastries
made of rye our, stued with minced veal cooked in oil. A dog
followed, also with clipped ears and tail, and with a rissole tied
around his neck. The agent circled a stone cross at the entrance to
the court three times, cracking his whip on each tour, dismounted
and knelt at the lion platform, and, if each detail of equipment and
performance was exactly right so far, was allowed to proceed. He
then mounted the platform, kissed the lion, and deposited the
rissoles plus twelve loaves of bread and three portions of wine as his
homage. The Sire de Coucy took a third of the oerings, distributed
the rest among the assembled bailis and town magistrates, and
stamped the document of homage with a seal representing a mitered
abbot with the feet of a goat.
Pagan, barbarian, feudal, Christian, accumulated out of the
shrouded past, here was medieval society—and the many-layered
elements of Western man.

Chapter 2

W
Born to Woe: The Century
hen the last of the Coucys was born, his country was
supreme but his century was already in trouble. A
physical chill settled on the 14th century at its very start,
initiating the miseries to come. The Baltic Sea froze over
twice, in 1303 and 1306–07; years followed of unseasonable cold,
storms and rains, and a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea.
Contemporaries could not know it was the onset of what has since
been recognized as the Little Ice Age, caused by an advance of polar
and alpine glaciers and lasting until about 1700. Nor were they yet
aware that, owing to the climatic change, communication with
Greenland was gradually being lost, that the Norse settlements there
were being extinguished, that cultivation of grain was disappearing
from Iceland and being severely reduced in Scandinavia. But they
could feel the colder weather, and mark with fear its result: a
shorter growing season.
This meant disaster, for population increase in the last century
had already reached a delicate balance with agricultural techniques.
Given the tools and methods of the time, the clearing of productive
land had already been pushed to its limits. Without adequate
irrigation and fertilizers, crop yield could not be raised nor poor
soils be made productive. Commerce was not equipped to transport
grain in bulk from surplus-producing areas except by water. Inland
towns and cities lived on local resources, and when these dwindled,
the inhabitants starved.
In 1315, after rains so incessant that they were compared to the
Biblical ood, crops failed all over Europe, and famine, the dark
horseman of the Apocalypse, became familiar to all. The previous
rise in population had already exceeded agricultural production,
leaving people undernourished and more vulnerable to hunger and

disease. Reports spread of people eating their own children, of the
poor in Poland feeding on hanged bodies taken down from the
gibbet. A contagion of dysentery prevailed in the same years. Local
famines recurred intermittently after the great sweep of 1315–16.
Acts of man no less than change in the climate marked the 14th
century as born to woe. In the rst twenty years, four ominous
events followed one after another: the assault on the Pope by the
King of France; the removal of the Papacy to Avignon; the
suppression of the Templars; and the rising of the Pastoureaux. The
most fateful was an assault on Boniface VIII by agents of Philip IV,
King of France, surnamed the Fair. The issue was temporal versus
papal authority arising from Philip’s levy of taxes on clerical income
without consent of the Pope. Boniface in response issued the deant
Bull Clericos Laicos in 1296 forbidding the clergy to pay any form of
tax whatsoever to any lay ruler. He recognized in the growing
tendency of prelates to hesitate between allegiance to their king and
obedience to the Pope a threat to the papal claim to universal rule
as Vicar of Christ. Despite formidable hostilities brought to bear on
him by Philip the Fair, Boniface asserted in a second Bull, Unam
Sanctam, in 1302, the most absolute statement of papal supremacy
ever made: “It is necessary to salvation that every human creature
be subject to the Roman ponti.”
Philip thereupon called for a council to judge the Pope on charges
of heresy, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, simony and sorcery
(including consorting with a familiar spirit or pet demon), and
failure to fast on fast days. At the same time Boniface drew up a Bull
to excommunicate the King, prompting Philip to resort to physical
force. On September 7, 1303, agents of the King, aided by anti-
papist Italian armed forces, seized the 86-year-old Pope in his
summer retreat at Anagni near Rome with the intention of
forestalling the excommunication and bringing him by force before
a council. After three days’ turmoil, Boniface was freed by the
citizens of Anagni, but the shock of the outrage was mortal and
within a month he was dead.
The assault on the Pope did not rally support for the cause of the
victim and the fact that it did not was a measure of change. The tide

was receding from the universality of the Church that had been the
medieval dream. The all-embracing claim of Boniface VIII was
obsolete before he made it. The indirect consequence of the “Crime
of Anagni” was the removal of the papacy to Avignon, and in that
“Babylonian Exile” demoralization began.
The move occurred when, under the inuence of Philip the Fair, a
French Pope was elected as Clement V. He did not go to Rome to
take up his See, mainly because he feared Italian reprisals for the
French treatment of Boniface, although the Italians said it was
because he kept a French mistress, the beautiful Countess of
Périgord, daughter of the Count of Foix. In 1309 he settled in
Avignon in Provence near the mouth of the Rhône. This was within
the French sphere, though technically not in France since Provence
was a ef of the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.
Thereafter under six French popes in succession, Avignon became
a virtual temporal state of sumptuous pomp, of great cultural
attraction, and of unlimited simony—that is, the selling of oces.
Diminished by its removal from the Holy See of Rome and by being
generally regarded as a tool of France, the papacy sought to make
up prestige and power in temporal terms. It concentrated on nance
and the organization and centralization of every process of papal
government that could bring in revenue. Besides its regular revenue
from tithes and annates on ecclesiastical income and from dues from
papal efs, every oce, every nomination, every appointment or
preferment, every dispensation of the rules, every judgment of the
Rota or adjudication of a claim, every pardon, indulgence, and
absolution, everything the Church had or was, from cardinal’s hat to
pilgrim’s relic, was for sale. In addition, the papacy took a cut of all
voluntary gifts and bequests and oerings on the altar. It received
Peter’s Pence from England and other kingdoms. It sold extra
indulgences in jubilee years and took a special tax for crusades
which continued to be proclaimed but rarely left home. The once
great impulse had faded, and fervor for holy war had become
largely verbal.
Beneces, of which there were 700 bishops’ sees and hundreds of
thousands of lower oces, were the most lucrative source of papal

income. Increasingly, the popes reserved more and more beneces
to their power of appointment, destroying the elective principle.
Since the appointees were often strangers to the diocese, or some
cardinal’s favorite, the practice aroused resentment within the
clergy. If an episcopal election was still held, the papacy charged a
fee for conrming it. To obtain a conferred benece, a bishop or
abbot greased the palms of the Curia for his nomination, paid
anywhere from a third to the whole of his rst year’s revenue as the
fee for his appointment, and knew that when he died his personal
property would revert to the Pope and any outstanding dues would
have to be paid by his successor.
Excommunication and anathema, the most extreme measures the
Church could command, supposedly reserved for heresy and
horrible crimes—“for by these penalties a man is separated from the
faithful and turned over to Satan”—were now used to wring money
from recalcitrant payers. In one case a bishop was denied Christian
burial until his heirs agreed to be responsible for his debts, to the
scandal of the diocese, which saw its bishop lying unshriven and cut
o from hope of salvation. Abuse of the spiritual power for such
purposes brought excommunication into contempt and lowered
respect for clerical leaders.
Money could buy any kind of dispensation: to legitimize children,
of which the majority were those of priests and prelates;* to divide a
corpse for the favorite custom of burial in two or more places; to
permit nuns to keep two maids; to permit a converted Jew to visit
his unconverted parents; to marry within the prohibited degree of
consanguinity (with a sliding scale of fees for the second, third, and
fourth degrees); to trade with the indel Moslem (with a fee
required for each ship on a scale according to cargo); to receive
stolen goods up to a specic value. The collection and accounting of
all these sums, largely handled through Italian bankers, made the
physical counting of cash a common sight in the papal palace.
Whenever he entered there, reportedAlvar Pelayo, a Spanish ocial
of the Curia, “I found brokers and clergy engaged in reckoning the
money which lay in heaps before them.”

The dispensation with most serious results was the one permitting
appointment to a benece of a candidate below the canonical age of
25 or one who had never been consecrated or never taken the
required examination for literacy. Appointment of unt or absentee
clergy became an abuse in itself. In Bohemia on one occasion in the
early 14th century, a boy of seven was appointed to a parish worth
an annual income of 25 gulden; another was raised through three
oces of the hierarchy, paying at each stage for a dispensation for
non-residence and postponed consecration. Younger sons of noble
families were repeatedly appointed to archbishoprics at 18, 20, or
22. Tenures were short because each preferment brought in another
payment.
Priests who could not read or who, from ignorance, stumbled
stupidly through the ritual of the Eucharist were another scandal. A
Bishop of Durham in 1318 could not understand or pronounce Latin
and after struggling helplessly with the word Metropolitanus at his
own consecration, muttered in the vernacular, “Let us take that
word as read.” Later when ordaining candidates for holy orders, he
met the word aenigmate (through a glass darkly) and this time swore
in honest outrage, “By St. Louis, that was no courteous man who
wrote this word!” The unt clergy spread dismay, for these were the
men supposed to have the souls of the laity in their charge and be
the intermediaries between man and God. Writing of “incapable and
ignorant men” who could buy any oce they wanted from the
Curia, the chronicler Henry of Hereford went to the heart of the
dismay when he wrote, “Look … at the dangerous situation of those
in their charge, and tremble!”
When Church practices were calculated at a money value, their
religious content seeped away. Theoretically, pardon for sin could
only be won through penitence, but the penance of a pilgrimage to
Rome or Jerusalem had little meaning when the culprit could
estimate the cost of the journey and buy an indulgence for an
equivalent sum.
The popes—successors, as Petrarch pointed out, of “the poor
shermen of Galilee”—were now “loaded with gold and clad in
purple.” John XXII, a Pope with the touch of Midas who ruled from

1316 to 1334, bought for his own use forty pieces of gold cloth from
Damascus for 1,276 gold orins and spent even more on furs,
including an ermine-trimmed pillow. The clothing of his retinue cost
7,000 to 8,000 orins a year.
His successors Benedict XII and Clement VI built in stages the
great papal palace at Avignon on a rock overlooking the Rhône, a
huge and inharmonious mass of roofs and towers without coherent
design. Constructed in castle style around interior courts, with
battlements and twelve-foot-thick walls for defense, it had odd
pyramidal chimneys rising from the kitchens, banqueting halls and
gardens, money chambers and oces, rose-windowed chapels, a
steam room for the Pope heated by a boiler, and a gate opening on
the public square where the faithful gathered to watch the Holy
Father ride out on his white mule. Here moved the majestic
cardinals in their wide red hats, “rich, insolent and rapacious” in
Petrarch’s words, vying with each other in the magnicence of their
suites. One required ten stables for his horses, and another rented
parts of 51 houses to lodge all his retainers.
Corridors of the palace bustled with notaries and ocers of the
Curia and legates departing on or returning from their missions.
Petitioners and their lawyers waited anxiously in anterooms,
pilgrims crowded in the courtyards to receive the pontical blessing,
while through the halls passed the parade of the Pope’s relatives of
both sexes in brocades and furs with their attending knights and
squires and retainers. The household of sergeants-at-arms, ushers,
chamberlains, chaplains, stewards, and servants numbered about
400, all supplied with board, lodging, clothing, and wages.
Tiled oors were ornamented in designs of owers, fantastic
beasts, and elaborate heraldry. Clement VI, a lover of luxury and
beauty who used 1,080 ermine skins in his personal wardrobe,
imported Matteo Giovanetti and artists from the school of Simone
Martini to paint the walls with scenes from the Bible. The four walls
of Clement’s own study, however, were entirely covered by scenes
of a noble’s secular pleasures: a stag hunt, falconry, orchards,
gardens, shponds, and a group of ambiguous nude bathers who

could be either women or children depending on the eye of the
beholder. No religious themes intruded.
At banquets the Pope’s guests dined o gold and silver plate,
seated beneath Flemish tapestries and hangings of silk. Receptions
for visiting princes and envoys rivaled the splendors of any secular
court. Papal entertainments, fetes, even tournaments and balls,
reproduced the secular.
“I am living in the Babylon of the West,” wrote Petrarch in the
1340s, where prelates feast at “licentious banquets” and ride on
snow-white horses “decked in gold, fed on gold, soon to be shod in
gold if the Lord does not check this slavish luxury.” Though himself
something of a lapsed cleric, Petrarch shared the clerical habit of
denouncing at double strength whatever was disapproved. Avignon
became for him “that disgusting city,” though whether because of
worldly corruption or the physical lth and smells of its narrow,
overcrowded streets is uncertain. The town, crammed with
merchants, artisans, ambassadors, adventurers, astrologers, thieves,
prostitutes, and no less than 43 branches of Italian banking houses
(in 1327), was not so well equipped as the papal palace for the
disposal of sewage. The palace had a tower whose two lower stories
contained exclusively latrines. Fitted with stone seats, these were
emptied into a pit below ground level that was ushed by water
from the kitchen drains and by an underground stream diverted for
the purpose. In the town, however, the stench caused the
ambassador from Aragon to swoon, and Petrarch to move out to
nearby Vaucluse “to prolong my life.”
More accessible than Rome, Avignon attracted visitors from all
over Europe, and its ow of money helped to support artists, writers
and scholars, masters of law and medicine, minstrels and poets. If
corrupt, it was also Maecenas. Everybody scolded Avignon and
everybody came there. St. Brigitta, a widowed Swedish noblewoman
who lived in Rome and eloquently deplored the sins of the times,
called the papal city “a eld full of pride, avarice, self-indulgence,
and corruption.” But corruption takes two, and if the papacy sinned,
it was not without partners. In the real world of shifting political
balances and every ruler’s constant need of money, popes and kings

needed each other and made the necessary adjustments. They dealt
in territories and sovereignties, men-at-arms, alliances, and loans. A
regular method was the levy for a crusade, which allowed
ecclesiastical income within each country to be taxed by its king,
who soon came to regard it as a right.
The clergy were partners too. When prelates were gorgeously
clad, the lower ranks would not long remain somber. Many were the
complaints, like that of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1342, that
the clergy were dressing like laymen, in checkerboard squares of red
and green, short coats, “notably scant,” with excessively wide
sleeves to show linings of fur or silk, hoods and tippets of
“wonderful length,” pointed and slashed shoes, jeweled girdles hung
with gilt purses. Worse, ignoring the tonsure, they wore beards and
long hair to the shoulders contrary to canonical rule, to the
“abominable scandal among the people.” Some kept jesters, dogs,
and falcons, some went abroad attended by guards of honor.
Nor could simony stay isolated at the top. When bishops
purchased beneces at the price of a year’s income, they passed the
cost down, so that corruption spread through the hierarchy from
canons and priors to priesthood and cloistered clergy, down to
mendicant friars and pardoners. It was at this level that the common
people met the materialism of the Church, and none were more
crass than the sellers of pardons.
Supposed to be commissioned by the Church, the pardoners
would sell absolution for any sin from gluttony to homicide, cancel
any vow of chastity or fasting, remit any penance for money, most
of which they pocketed. When commissioned to raise money for a
crusade, according to Matteo Villani, they would take from the poor,
in lieu of money, “linen and woolen stus or furnishings, grain and
fodder … deceiving the people. That was the way they gave the
Cross.” What they were peddling was salvation, taking advantage of
the people’s need and credulity to sell its counterfeit. The only
really detestable character in Chaucer’s company of Canterbury
pilgrims is the Pardoner with his stringy locks, his eunuch’s hairless
skin, his glaring eyes like a hare’s, and his brazen acknowledgment
of the tricks and deceits of his trade.

The regular clergy detested the pardoner for undoing the work of
penance, for endangering souls insofar as his goods were spurious,
and for invading clerical territory, taking collections on feast days or
performing burial and other services for a fee that should have gone
to the parish priest. Yet the system permitted him to function
because it shared in the prots.
The sins of monks and itinerant friars were more disturbing
because their pretensions as men of God were higher. They were
notorious as seducers of women. Peddling furs and girdles for
wenches and wives, and small gentle dogs “to get love of them,” the
friar in a 14th century poem “came to our dame when the gode man
is from home.”
He spares nauther for synne ne shame,
For may he tyl a woman synne
In priveyte, he will not blynne
Er he a childe put hir withinne
And perchance two at ones.
In the tales of Boccaccio, in the fabliaux of France, in all popular
literature of the time, clerical celibacy is a joke. Priests lived with
mistresses or else went in hunt of them. “A priest lay with a lady
who was wed to a knight,” begins one tale matter-of-factly. In
another, “the priest and his lady went o to bed.” In the nunnery
where Piers Plowman served as cook, Sister Pernell was “a priest’s
wench” who “bore a child in cherry time.” Boccaccio’s rascally friars
were invariably caught in embarrassing situations as victims of their
own lechery. In real life their sinfulness was not funny but
threatening, for when a friar failed so far in holiness how could he
save souls? This sense of betrayal explains why the friars were so
often the object of active hostility, sometimes even of physical
assault, because, as a chronicle of 1327 stated simply, “they did not
behave as friars ought.”
According to the ideal of St. Francis, they were supposed to
wander the world to do good, to walk barefoot among the poor and
the outcasts bringing Christian love to the lowest, to beg for the

necessaries of life in kind, never in money. By a supreme paradox,
the Order that Francis founded on rejection of property attracted the
support and donations of the wealthy because its purity seemed to
oer assurance of holiness. Upon the approach of death, knights and
noble ladies would have themselves clad in the Franciscan habit,
believing that if they died and were buried in it, they could not go
to hell.
The Order acquired lands and riches, built itself churches and
cloisters, developed its own hierarchy—all the opposite of the
founder’s intent. Yet St. Francis had understood the process.
Replying to a novice who wished to have a psalter, he once said,
“When you have a psalter you will wish to have a breviary, and
when you have a breviary you will sit in a chair like a great prelate
and say to your brother, ‘Brother, bring me my breviary.’ ”
In some monastic orders the monks had regular pocket money and
private funds which they lent at interest. In some they had an
allowance of a gallon of ale a day, ate meat, wore jewels and fur-
trimmed gowns, and employed servants who in wealthy convents
sometimes outnumbered the members. Enjoying the favor of the
rich, the Franciscans preached to them and dined with them and
took oce in noble households as counselors and chaplains. Some
still went barefoot among the poor, holding to their role, and were
revered for it, but most now wore good leather boots and were not
loved.
Like the pardoner, they bilked the villagers, selling them relics of
inspired imagination. Boccaccio’s Friar Cipolla sold one of the Angel
Gabriel’s feathers which he said had fallen in the Virgin’s chamber
during the Annunciation. As satire, this did not overreach the real
friar who sold a piece of the bush from which the Lord spoke to
Moses. Some sold drafts on the Treasury of Merit supposed to be
stored in Heaven by the Order of St. Francis. Wyclif, on being asked
what these parchments were good for, replied: “To covere mustard
pottis.” The friars were an element of daily life, scorned yet
venerated and feared because they might, after all, have the key to
salvation.

The satire and complaints survive because they are written down.
They leave an impression of a Church so pervaded by venality and
hypocrisy as to seem ripe for dissolution, but an institution so in
command of the culture and so rooted in the structure of society
does not readily dissolve. Christianity was the matrix of medieval
life: even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg “during the
length of time wherein you can say a Miserere.” It governed birth,
marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made the rules for law and
medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter.
Membership in the Church was not a matter of choice; it was
compulsory and without alternative, which gave it a hold not easy
to dislodge.
As an integral part of life, religion was both subjected to
burlesque and unharmed by it. In the annual Feast of Fools at
Christmastime, every rite and article of the Church no matter how
sacred was celebrated in mockery. A dominus festi, or lord of the
revels, was elected from the inferior clergy—the curés, subdeacons,
vicars, and choir clerks, mostly ill-educated, ill-paid, and ill-
disciplined—whose day it was to turn everything topsy-turvy. They
installed their lord as Pope or Bishop or Abbot of Fools in a
ceremony of head-shaving accompanied by bawdy talk and lewd
acts; dressed him in vestments turned inside out; played dice on the
altar and ate black puddings and sausages while mass was
celebrated in nonsensical gibberish; swung censers made of old
shoes emitting “stinking smoke”; ociated in the various oces of
the priest wearing beast masks and dressed as women or minstrels;
sang obscene songs in the choir; howled and hooted and jangled
bells while the “Pope” recited a doggerel benediction. At his call to
follow him on pain of having their breeches split, all rush violently
from the church to parade through the town, drawing the dominus
in a cart from which he issues mock indulgences while his followers
hiss, cackle, jeer, and gesticulate. They rouse the bystanders to
laughter with “infamous performances” and parody preachers in
scurrilous sermons. Naked men haul carts of manure which they
throw at the populace. Drinking bouts and dances accompany the

procession. The whole was a burlesque of the too-familiar, tedious,
and often meaningless rituals; a release of “the natural lout beneath
the cassock.”
In daily life the Church was comforter, protector, physician. The
Virgin and patron saints gave succor in trouble and protection
against the evils and enemies that lurked along every man’s path.
Craft guilds, towns, and functions had patron saints, as did
individuals. Archers and crossbowmen had St. Sebastian, martyr of
the arrows; bakers had St. Honoré, whose banner bore an oven
shovel argent and three loaves gules; sailors had St. Nicholas with
the three children he saved from the sea; travelers had St.
Christopher carrying the infant Jesus on his shoulder; charitable
brotherhoods usually chose St. Martin, who gave half his cloak to
the poor man; unmarried girls had St. Catherine, supposed to have
been very beautiful. The patron saint was an extra companion
through life who healed hurts, soothed distress, and in extremity
could make miracles. His image was carried on banners in
processions, sculpted over the entrance to town halls and chapels,
and worn as a medallion on an individual’s hat.
Above all, the Virgin was the ever-merciful, ever-dependable
source of comfort, full of compassion for human frailty, caring
nothing for laws and judges, ready to respond to anyone in trouble;
amid all the inequities, injuries, and senseless harms, the one never-
failing gure. She frees the prisoner from his dungeon, revives the
starving with milk from her own breasts. When a peasant mother
takes her son, blinded by a thorn in his eye, to the Church of St.
Denis, kneels before Our Lady, recites an Ave Maria, and makes the
sign of the cross over the child with a sacred relic, the nail of the
Saviour, “at once,” reports the chronicler, “the thorn falls out, the
inammation disappears, and the mother in joy returns home with
her son no longer blind.”
A hardened murderer has no less access. No matter what crime a
person has committed, though every man’s hand be against him, he
is still not cut o from the Virgin. In the Miracles of Notre Dame, a
cycle of popular plays performed in the towns, the Virgin redeems
every kind of malefactor who reaches out to her through the act of

repentance. A woman accused of incest with her son-in-law has
procured his assassination by two hired men and is about to be
burned at the stake. She prays to Notre Dame, who promptly
appears and orders the re not to burn. Convinced of a miracle, the
magistrates free the condemned woman, who, after distributing her
goods and money to the poor, enters a convent. The act of faith
through prayer was what counted. It was not justice one received
from the Church but forgiveness.
More than comfort, the Church gave answers. For nearly a
thousand years it had been the central institution that gave meaning
and purpose to life in a capricious world. It armed that man’s life
on earth was but a passage in exile on the way to God and to the
New Jerusalem, “our other home.” Life was nothing, wrote Petrarch
to his brother, but “a hard and weary journey toward the eternal
home for which we look; or, if we neglect our salvation, an equally
pleasureless way to eternal death.” What the Church oered was
salvation, which could be reached only through the rituals of the
established Church and by the permission and aid of its ordained
priests. “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus” (No salvation outside the
Church) was the rule.
Salvation’s alternative was Hell and eternal torture, very
realistically pictured in the art of the time. In Hell the damned hung
by their tongues from trees of re, the impenitent burned in
furnaces, unbelievers smothered in foul-smelling smoke. The wicked
fell into the black waters of an abyss and sank to a depth
proportionate to their sins: fornicators up to the nostrils, persecutors
of their fellow man up to the eyebrows. Some were swallowed by
monstrous sh, some gnawed by demons, tormented by serpents, by
re or ice or fruits hanging forever out of reach of the starving. In
Hell men were naked, nameless, and forgotten. No wonder salvation
was important and the Day of Judgment present in every mind.
Over the doorway of every cathedral it was carved in vivid
reminder, showing the numerous sinners roped and led o by devils
toward a aming cauldron while angels led the fewer elect to bliss
in the opposite direction.

No one doubted in the Middle Ages that the vast majority would
be eternally damned. Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitudo
(Few saved, many damned) was the stern principle maintained from
Augustine to Aquinas. Noah and his family were taken to indicate
the proportion of the saved, usually estimated at one in a thousand
or even one in ten thousand. No matter how few were to be chosen,
the Church oered hope to all. Salvation was permanently closed to
non-believers in Christ, but not to sinners, for sin was an inherent
condition of life which could be canceled as often as necessary by
penitence and absolution. “Turn thee again, turn thee again, thou
sinful soul,” spoke a Lollard preacher, “for God knoweth thy
misgovernance and will not forsake thee. Turn thou to me saith the
Lord and I shall receive thee and take thee to grace.”
The Church gave ceremony and dignity to lives that had little of
either. It was the source of beauty and art to which all had some
access and which many helped to create. To carve the stone folds of
an apostle’s gown, to paste with innite patience the bright mosaic
chips into a picture of winged angels in a heavenly chorus, to stand
in the towering space of a cathedral nave amid pillars rising and
rising to an almost invisible vault and know this to be man’s work in
honor of God, gave pride to the lowest and could make the least
man an artist.
The Church, not the government, sponsored the care of society’s
helpless—the indigent and sick, orphan and cripple, the leper, the
blind, the idiot—by indoctrinating the laity in the belief that alms
bought them merit and a foothold in Heaven. Based on this
principle, the impulse of Christian charity was self-serving but
eective. Nobles gave alms daily at the castle gate to all comers, in
coin and in leftover food from the hall. Donations from all sources
poured into the hospitals, favorite recipients of Christian charity.
Merchants bought themselves peace of mind for the non-Christian
business of making prot by allocating a regular percentage to
charity. This was entered in the ledger under the name of God as the
poor’s representative. A Christian duty of particular merit was the
donation of dowries to enable poor girls to marry, as in the case of a

Gascon seigneur of the 14th century who left 100 livres to “those
whom I deowered, if they can be found.”
Corporate bodies accepted the obligation to help the poor as a
religious duty. The statutes of craft guilds set aside a penny for
charity, called “God’s penny,” from each contract of sale or
purchase. Parish councils of laymen superintended maintenance of
the “Table of the Poor” and of a bank for alms. On feast days it was
a common practice to invite twelve poor to the banquet table, and
on Holy Thursday, in memory of Christ, the mayor of a town or
other notable would wash the feet of a beggar. When St. Louis
conducted the ceremony, his companion and biographer, the Sire de
Joinville, refused to participate, saying it would make him sick to
touch the feet of such villeins. It was not always easy to love the
poor.
The clergy on the whole were probably no more lecherous or
greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were
supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings
attracted more attention. If Clement VI was luxury-loving, he was
also generous and warm-hearted. The Parson among the Canterbury
pilgrims is as benign and admirable as the Pardoner is repulsive,
always ready to visit on foot the farthest and poorest house of his
parish, undeterred by thunder and rain.
To drawen folk to heaven with fairnesse
By good ensample was his businesse.
Nevertheless, a wind of discontent was rising. Papal tax-collectors
were attacked and beaten, and even bishops were not safe. In 1326,
in a burst of anti-clericalism, a London mob beheaded the Bishop
and left his body naked in the street. In 1338 two “rectors of
churches” joined two knights and a “great crowd of country folk” in
attacking the Bishop of Constance, severely wounding several of his
retinue, and holding him in prison. Among the religious themselves,
the discontent took serious form. In Italy arose the Fraticelli, a sect
of the Franciscan Order, in another of the poverty-embracing
movements that periodically tormented the Church by wanting to

disendow it. The Fraticelli or Spiritual Franciscans insisted that
Christ had lived without possessions, and they preached a return to
that condition as the only true “imitation of Christ.”
The poverty movements grew out of the essence of Christian
doctrine: renunciation of the material world—the idea that made
the great break with the classical age. It maintained that God was
positive and life on earth negative, that the world was incurably bad
and holiness achieved only through renunciation of earthly
pleasures, goods, and honors. To gain victory over the esh was the
purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this
world for the sake of reward in the next. Money was evil, beauty
vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain
was avarice, desire of the esh was lust, desire for honor, even for
knowledge and beauty, was vainglory. Insofar as these diverted man
from seeking the life of the spirit, they were sinful. The Christian
ideal was ascetic: the denial of sensual man. The result was that,
under the sway of the Church, life became a continual struggle
against the senses and a continual engagement in sin, accounting for
the persistent need for absolution.
Repeatedly, mystical sects arose in an eort to sweep away the
whole detritus of the material world, to become nearer to God by
cutting the earth-binding chains of property. Embedded in its lands
and buildings, the Church could only react by denouncing the sects
as heretical. The Fraticelli’s stubborn insistence on the absolute
poverty of Christ and his twelve Apostles was acutely inconvenient
for the Avignon papacy, which condemned their doctrine as “false
and pernicious” heresy in 1315 and, when they refused to desist,
excommunicated them and other associated sects at various times
during the next decade. Twenty-seven members of a particularly
stubborn group of Spiritual Franciscans of Provence were tried by
the Inquisition and four of them burned at the stake at Marseille in
1318.
The wind of temporal challenge to papal supremacy was rising
too, focusing on the Pope’s right to crown the Emperor, and setting
the claims of the state against those of the Church. The Pope tried to
excommunicate this temporal spirit in the person of its boldest

exponent, Marsilius of Padua, whose Defensor Pacis in 1324 was a
forthright assertion of the supremacy of the state. Two years later
the logic of the struggle led John XXII to excommunicate William of
Ockham, the English Franciscan, known for his forceful reasoning as
“the invincible doctor.” In expounding a philosophy called
“nominalism,” Ockham opened a dangerous door to direct intuitive
knowledge of the physical world. He was in a sense a spokesman for
intellectual freedom, and the Pope recognized the implications by
his ban. In reply to the excommunication, Ockham promptly
charged John XXII with seventy errors and seven heresies.
In economic man, the lay spirit did not challenge the Church, yet
functioned in essential contradiction. Capitalist enterprise, although
it held by now a commanding place, violated by its very nature the
Christian attitude toward commerce, which was one of active
antagonism. It held that money was evil, that according to St.
Augustine “Business is in itself an evil,” that prot beyond a
minimum necessary to support the dealer was avarice, that to make
money out of money by charging interest on a loan was the sin of
usury, that buying goods wholesale and selling them unchanged at a
higher retail price was immoral and condemned by canon law, that,
in short, St. Jerome’s dictum was nal: “A man who is a merchant
can seldom if ever please God” (Homo mercator vix aut numquam
potest Deo placere).
It followed that banker, merchant, and businessman lived in daily
commission of sin and daily contradiction of the moral code
centering upon the “just price.” This was based on the principle that
a craft should supply each man a livelihood and a fair return to all,
but no more. Prices should be set at a “just” level, meaning the
value of the labor added to the value of the raw material. To ensure
that no one gained an advantage over anyone else, commercial law
prohibited innovation in tools or techniques, underselling below a
xed price, working late by articial light, employing extra
apprentices or wife and under-age children, and advertising of
wares or praising them to the detriment of others. As restraint of

initiative, this was the direct opposite of capitalist enterprise. It was
the denial of economic man, and consequently even more routinely
violated than the denial of sensual man.
No economic activity was more irrepressible than the investment
and lending at interest of money; it was the basis for the rise of
Western capitalist economy and the building of private fortunes—
and it was based on the sin of usury. Nothing so vexed medieval
thinking, nothing so baed and eluded settlement, nothing was so
great a tangle of irreconcilables as the theory of usury. Society
needed moneylending while Christian doctrine forbade it. That was
the basic dichotomy, but the doctrine was so elastic that “even wise
men” were unsure of its provisions. For practical purposes, usury
was considered to be not the charging of interest per se, but
charging at a higher rate than was decent. This was left to the Jews
as the necessary dirty work of society, and if they had not been
available they would have had to be invented. While theologians
and canonists argued endlessly and tried vainly to decide whether
10, 12.5, 15, or 20 percent was decent, the bankers went on lending
and investing at whatever rates the situation would bear.
Merchants regularly paid nes for breaking every law that
concerned their business, and went on as before. The wealth of
Venice and Genoa was made in trade with the indels of Syria and
Egypt despite papal prohibition. Prior to the 14th century, it has
been said, men “could hardly imagine the merchant’s strongbox
without picturing the devil squatting on the lid.” Whether the
merchant too saw the devil as he counted coins, whether he lived
with a sense of guilt, is hard to assess. Francisco Datini, the
merchant of Prato, judging by his letters, was a deeply troubled
man, but his agonies were caused more by fear of loss than by fear
of God. He was evidently able to reconcile Christianity and business,
for the motto on his ledger was “In the name of God and of prot.”
Division of rich and poor became increasingly sharp. With control
of the raw materials and tools of production, the owners were able
to reduce wages in classic exploitation. The poor saw them now as
enemies, no longer as protectors but as exploiters, as Dives, the rich
man consigned to hellre, as wolves, and themselves as lambs. They

felt a sense of injustice that nding no remedy grew into a spirit of
revolt.
Medieval theory intended that the lord or ruler should respond to
charges of oppression by investigating and ordering the necessary
reform to ensure that taxes fell equally on rich and poor. But this
theory corresponded to reality no more than other medieval ideals,
and because of this, wrote Philippe de Beaumanoir in 1280–83,
“there have been acts of violence because the poor will not suer
this but know not how to obtain their right except by rising and
seizing it themselves.” They formed associations, he reported, to
refuse to work for “so low a price as formerly but they will raise the
price by their own authority” and take “certain pains and
punishments” against those who do not join them. This seemed to
Beaumanoir a terrible act against the common good, “for the
common interest cannot suer that work should stop.” He
advocated that such persons should be arrested and kept long in
prison and afterward ned 60 sous each, the traditional ne for
rupture of the “public peace.”
The most persistent ferment was among the weavers and cloth-
workers of Flanders, where economic expansion had been most
intense. The textile industry was the automobile industry of the
Middle Ages, and Flanders was a hothouse of the tensions and
antagonisms brewed in urban society by capitalist development.
Once united by a common craft, the guild of masters, journeymen,
and apprentices had spread apart into entrepreneurs and hired
hands divided by class hatred. The guild was now a corporation run
by the employers in which the workers had no voice. The magnates,
who married into the nobility and bought country estates in
addition to their city real estate, developed into a patrician class
that controlled the government of the towns and managed it in their
own interest. They founded churches and hospitals, built the great
Cloth Halls, paved the streets, and created the canal system. But
they made up the greater part of municipal expenses from sales
taxes on wine, beer, peat, and grain, which fell most heavily on the
poor. They favored each other in governing groups like the Thirty-
nine of Ghent, named for life and serving in annual rotation of three

parties of thirteen, or the twelve magistrates of Arras, who rotated
among themselves every four months, or the oligarchy of the
Hundred Peers of Rouen, which appointed the mayor and town
councillors each year. The lower bourgeois who made fortunes and
pressed upward could frequently penetrate the monopoly, but the
artisans, despised as “blue nails” and vulnerable to unemployment,
had no political rights.
Beneath the cry of protest much of medieval life was supportive
because it was lived collectively in innite numbers of groups,
orders, associations, brotherhoods. Never was man less alone. Even
in bedrooms married couples often slept in company with their
servants and children. Except for hermits and recluses, privacy was
unknown.
As nobles had their orders of chivalry, the common man had the
confrérie or brotherhood of his trade or village, which surrounded
him at every crux of life. Usually numbering from 20 to 100
members, these groups were associations for charity and social
service as well as for entertainment and religious observance in lay
life. They accompanied a member to the town gates when he went
o on a pilgrimage and marched in his funeral when he died. If a
man was condemned to be executed, fellow members accompanied
him to the scaold. If he drowned accidentally as in a case at
Bordeaux, they searched the Garonne for three days for his body. If
he died insolvent, the association furnished his shroud and the costs
of the funeral and helped to support the widow and children. The
furriers of Paris paid sick members three sous a week during
incapacity for work and three sous for a week of convalescence. The
associations’ money came from dues scaled according to income and
payable weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
The brotherhoods staged religious plays, furnished the music, and
served as actors and stagehands. They held competitions, sports and
games, awarded prizes, and invited the orator or preacher for
special occasions. On feast days, after strewing the streets with
owers, the confréries joined in the processions, each marching in a

body in the bright colors of its own costume, preceded by its banner
and statue or portrait of its patron saint. Members were bound by
rites and oaths; in some brotherhoods, they wore masks to conceal
identity, making all within the group equal.
When the confréries donated church windows or commissioned
murals, choir stalls, or illuminated books, the members could take
pride in being patrons of art just like the nobles and rich magnates.
Through their association they could buy merit as benefactors,
adopting a hospital, distributing alms and food to the poor, or
undertaking the charge of certain categories—as when the grocers
of Paris supported the blind and the drapers supported prisoners in
the city jail. The confréries provided a context of life that was
intensely sociable, with the solace and sometimes the abrasions that
sociability implies.
In 1320 the misery of the rural poor in the wake of the famines
burst out in a strange hysterical mass movement called the
Pastoureaux, for the shepherds who started it. Though less uprooted
than the urban poor, the peasant too felt oppressed by the rich and
was forever struggling against the lord’s eort to grasp by one
means or another more of the peasant’s product or more of his
services. Cases in manor courts going back to 1250 show peasants in
concerted deliberate refusal to plow the lord’s eld, thresh his grain,
turn his hay, or grind at his mill. Persisting year after year, despite
nes and punishment, they denied bondage, disposed of land
without consent, joined in bands to assault the baili or to rescue a
fellow peasant from the stocks.
Oppression of the peasant by the landowner troubled the
conscience of the time and evoked warnings. “Ye nobles are like
ravening wolves,” wrote Jacques de Vitry, a 13th century author of
sermons and moral tales. “Therefore shall ye howl in hell … who
despoil your subjects and live on the blood and sweat of the poor.”
Whatever the peasant amasses in a year, “the knight, the noble
devours in an hour.” He imposes illicit taxes and heavy exactions.
De Vitry warned the great not to scorn the humble or inspire their

hate for “if they can aid us, they can also do us harm. You know
that many serfs have killed their masters or have burned their
houses.”
A prophecy current in the time of the famine foretold that the
poor would rise against the powerful, overthrow the Church and an
unspecied great monarchy, and after much bloodshed a new age of
unity under one cross would dawn. Combining with vague talk of a
new crusade and preached among the poor by an apostate monk
and an unfrocked priest, the prophecy “as suddenly and
unexpectedly as a storm” swept the peasants and rootless poor of
northern France into a mass marching southward toward an
imagined embarkation for the Holy Land. Gathering adherents and
arms as they went, they stormed castles and abbeys, burned town
halls and tax records, opened prisons, and when they reached the
south threw themselves in concentrated assault upon the Jews.
Peasant indebtedness to Jews for loans to tide over bad times or
enable the purchase of tools or a plow was of long standing. The
peasants had thought the debt wiped out when Philip the Fair
expelled the Jews in 1306, but his son Louis X brought them back
on terms that made him a partner with a two-thirds share in the
recovery of their debts. Exacerbating an old grudge, this drove the
Pastoureaux, enthusiastically aided by the populace, to the slaughter
of almost every Jew from Bordeaux to Albi. Despite the King’s order
that the Jews be protected, local authorities could not restrain the
attacks and in some cases joined them.
That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the
Church that the most devout persons were the harshest in their
antipathy, none more so than St. Louis. If the Jews were unholy,
then killing and looting them was holy work. Lepers too were
targets of the Pastoureaux on the theory that they had joined the
Jews in a horrible compact to poison the wells, and their
persecution was made ocial by a royal ordinance of 1321.
Menacing Avignon, attacking priests, threatening to seize Church
property, the Pastoureaux spread the fear of insurrection that
freezes the blood of the privileged in any era when the mob appears.
Excommunicated by Pope John XXII, they were nally suppressed

when he forbade anyone to provision them on pain of death and
sanctioned the use of force against them. That was sucient, and
the Pastoureaux ended like every outbreak of the poor sooner or
later in the Middle Ages, with corpses hanging from the trees.
In the woe of the century no factor caused more trouble than the
persistent lag between the growth of the state and the means of
state nancing. While centralized government was developing,
taxation was still encased in the concept that taxes represented an
emergency measure requiring consent. Having exhausted every
other source of funds, Philip the Fair in 1307 turned on the
Templars in the most sensational episode of his reign. The result
brought a curse, as his contemporaries believed, upon their country,
and what people believe about their own time becomes a factor in
its history.
No downfall was to be so complete and spectacular as that of this
arrogant order of monastic knighthood. Formed during the crusades
to be the sword arm of the Church in defense of the Holy Land, the
Templars had moved from ideals of asceticism and poverty to
immense resources and an international web of power outside the
regular channels of allegiance. Tax exempt from the start, they had
amassed riches as bankers for the Holy See and as moneylenders at
lower interest rates than the Lombards and Jews. They were not
known for charity and, unlike the Knights of St. John, supported no
hospitals. With 2,000 members in France and the largest treasury in
northern Europe, they maintained headquarters in the Temple, their
formidable fortress in Paris.
Not only their money but their existence as a virtually
autonomous enclave invited destruction. Their sinister reputation,
grown from the secrecy of their rituals, supplied the means. In a
pounce like a tiger’s leap, Philip seized the Temple in Paris and had
every Templar in France arrested on the same night. To justify
conscation of the Order’s property, the main charge was heresy, in
proof of which the King’s prosecutors dragged into the light every
dark superstition and fearful imagining of sorcery and Devil-worship

that lay along the roots of the medieval mind. The Templars were
accused by suborned witnesses of bestiality, idol-worship, denial of
the sacraments; of selling their souls to the Devil and adoring him in
the form of a huge cat; of sodomy with each other and intercourse
with demons and succubi; of requiring initiates to deny God, Christ,
and the Virgin, to spit three times, urinate, and trample on the
cross, and to give the “kiss of shame” to the prior of the Order on
the mouth, penis, and buttocks. To strengthen resolution for these
various practices, they were said to drink a powder made from the
ashes of dead members and their own illegitimate children.
Elements of witchcraft, magic, and sorcery were taken for granted
in medieval life, but Philip’s use of them to prove heresy in the
seven-year melodrama of the Templars’ trials gave them fearful
currency. Thereafter charges of black arts became a common means
to bring down an enemy and a favored method of the Inquisition in
its pursuit of heretics, especially those with property worth
conscating. In Toulouse and Carcassonne during the next 35 years
the Inquisition prosecuted 1,000 persons on such charges and
burned 600. French justice was corrupted and the pattern laid for
the fanatic witchcraft persecutions of subsequent centuries.
Philip bullied the rst Avignon Pope, Clement V, into authorizing
the trials of the Templars, and with this authority put them to
atrocious tortures to extract confessions. Medieval justice was
scrupulous about holding proper trials and careful not to sentence
without proof of guilt, but it achieved proof by confession rather
than evidence, and confession was routinely obtained by torture.
The Templars, many of them old men, were racked, thumbscrewed,
starved, hung with weights until joints were dislocated, had teeth
and ngernails pulled one by one, bones broken by the wedge, feet
held over ames, always with pauses in between and the “question”
put again each day until confession was wrung or the victim died.
Thirty-six died under the treatment; some committed suicide.
Broken by torture, the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and 122
others confessed to spitting on the cross or some other variation of
crime put into their mouths by the Inquisitors. “And he would have

confessed that he had slain God Himself if they had asked him that,”
acknowledged a chronicler.
The process dragged on through prolonged jockeying over
jurisdiction by Pope, King, and Inquisition while the victims, hung
with chains and barely fed, were hauled in and out of their
dungeons for further trials and humiliations. Sixty-seven who found
the courage to recant their confessions were burned alive as
relapsed heretics. After futile squirming by Clement V, the Templars’
Order in France and all its branches in England, Scotland, Aragon,
Castile, Portugal, Germany, and the Kingdom of Naples were
abolished by the Council of Vienne in 1311–12. Ocially its
property was transferred to the Knights Hospitalers of St. John, but
the presence of Philip the Fair sitting at the Pope’s right hand at
Vienne indicates that he was not left out of the arrangement.
Afterward, indeed, the Knights of St. John paid him an enormous
sum as a debt which he claimed from the Templars.
The end was not yet. In March 1314 the Grand Master, who had
been the King’s friend and godfather of his daughter, was conducted
with his chief lieutenant to a scaold erected in the plaza in front of
the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris to rearm their confessions
and be sentenced to life imprisonment by the papal legates. Instead,
before the packed assembly of nobles, clergy, and commoners, they
proclaimed their own and the Order’s innocence. Despoiled of his
nal justication, the King ordered both men to be burned at the
stake. As the faggots amed next day, Jacques de Molay again
proclaimed his innocence and cried aloud that God would be his
avenger. According to the tradition that developed later, he called
down a curse upon the King and his descendants to the thirteenth
generation, and, in the last words to be heard as he burned to death,
summoned Philip and Pope Clement to meet him before God’s
judgment seat within a year. Within a month Clement did in fact
die, followed seven months later in November by Philip, in the
midst of life, aged 46, from uncertain causes some weeks after a
horseback accident. The legend of the Templar’s curse developed, as
most legends do, to explain strange coincidences after the event.
The symptoms reported at Philip’s deathbed have since been judged

indicative of a cerebral stroke, but to awed contemporaries the
cause was indubitably the Templar’s curse that had oated upward
with the smoke from the pyre in the red light of the setting sun.
As if carrying out the curse on Philip’s posterity, the Capetian
dynasty suddenly withered in the strange triplicate destiny of Philip
the Fair’s sons. Succeeding each other as Louis X, Philip V, and
Charles IV, they reigned less than six years apiece and died aged 27,
28, and 33 respectively, each without leaving a male successor
despite a total of six wives among them. Jeanne, the four-year-old
daughter of the eldest brother, was passed over by her uncle, who
had himself crowned as Philip V. After the event he convoked an
assembly of notables from the three estates and the University of
Paris, which duly approved his right on the principle, formulated for
the occasion, that “a woman does not succeed to the throne of
France.” Thus was born the momentous Salic “Law” that was to
create a permanent bar to the succession of women where none had
existed before.
The death of the last of the three brothers in 1328 left the
succession to the crown open, with results that led to the longest
war—so far—in Western history. Three claimants were available—a
grandson and two nephews of Philip the Fair. The grandson was the
sixteen-year-old Edward III of England, son of Philip the Fair’s
daughter Isabel, who had married Edward II. She was generally
believed to have connived with her lover in the murder of her
husband the King, and to exercise a malign inuence upon her son.
His claim of direct lineage, vigorously put forward, met no
welcomers in France not because it derived through a woman but
because the woman in question was feared and disliked and in any
case no one wanted the King of England on the throne of France.
The other two claimants, sons respectively of a brother and a half-
brother of Philip the Fair, were Philip of Valois and Philip of
Evreux. The rst, a man of 35, son of an illustrious father, well
known to the court and nobles of France, was easily the preferred
choice and was conrmed as king by the princes and peers of France

without overt opposition. As Philip VI he began the Valois line. Both
of his rivals formally accepted the choice, Edward by coming in
person to place his hands between those of Philip VI in homage for
the Duchy of Guienne. The other Philip was recompensed by the
Kingdom of Navarre and marriage to the bypassed Jeanne.
Though Philip VI maintained court in great state, he had not
grown up expecting to be king and lacked something of the regal
character. He seemed troubled by some uneasiness about his right to
the crown, which was hardly soothed by his contemporaries’ habit
of referring to him as le roi trouvé (the found king) as if he had been
discovered in the bulrushes. Or perhaps the lurking rights of his
female cousins threatened him. He was dominated by his wife, the
“bad lame Queen,” Jeanne de Bourgogne, a malicious woman
neither loved nor respected although she was a patron of the arts
and of all scholars who came to court. Very devout like his great-
grandfather St. Louis, though not his equal in intelligence or will,
Philip was fascinated by the all-absorbing question of the Beatic
Vision: whether the souls of the blessed see the face of God
immediately upon entering Heaven or whether they have to wait
until the Day of Judgment.
The question was of real concern because the intercession of the
saints on behalf of man was eective only if they had been admitted
into the presence of God. Shrines possessing saints’ relics relied for
revenue on popular condence that a particular saint was in a
position to make a personal appeal to the Almighty. Philip VI twice
summoned theologians to debate the issue before him and fell into a
“mighty choler” when the papal legate to Paris conveyed Pope John
XXII’s doubts of the Beatic Vision. “The King reprimanded him
sharply and threatened to burn him like an Albigensian unless he
retracted, and said further that if the Pope really held such views he
would regard him as a heretic.” A worried man, Philip wrote to the
Pope that to deny the Beatic Vision was to destroy belief in the
intercession of the Virgin and saints. Fortunately for the King’s
peace of mind, a papal commission decided after thorough
investigation that the souls of the Blessed did indeed come face to
face with the Divine Essence.

Philip’s reign started well and the realm prospered. The eect of
famine and epidemics was passing, evil portents were forgotten,
perpetually contentious Flanders was brought back under French
control by a victorious campaign in Philip’s rst year. The crown’s
relations with ve of the six great efs—Flanders, Burgundy,
Brittany, and, in the south, Armagnac and Foix—were reasonably
rm. Only Guienne (or Aquitaine), which the Kings of England held
as a ef of the Kings of France, was a perennial source of conict.
Here the English eort to expand pressed continually against the
French eort to re-absorb the ef.
As the conict came to a head, it brought about in 1338 a
marriage that connected the Coucys with yet another reigning
house, the Hapsburgs of Austria. This was the union from which
Enguerrand VII was to be born. It was arranged by Philip VI himself,
who was seeking allies in the coming struggle with England. In 1337
Philip had declared Guienne conscated, whereupon Edward III
announced himself the rightful King of France and prepared for war.
Edward’s renewed claim was not so much the reason for war as an
excuse to resolve by war the endless conict over the sovereignty of
Guienne. While English forces landed in Flanders to prepare for the
assault, both sides feverishly sought allies in the Low Countries and
across the Rhine.
King Philip was concerned not only to gather allies but to ensure
the loyalty of the strategically located barony of Coucy. As a rich
prize, he obtained for Enguerrand VI the hand of Catherine of
Austria, daughter of Duke Leopold I and granddaughter through her
mother of the equally illustrious Amadeus V, Count of Savoy. The
house of Savoy were autonomous rulers of a region extending from
France to Italy astride the Alps, and themselves the center of a
princely web of marriage threads connecting with crowns all over
Europe—and beyond. One of Catherine’s seven aunts was the wife
of Andronicus III Paleologus, Emperor of Byzantium.
Marriages were the fabric of international as well as inter-noble
relations, the primary source of territory, sovereignty, and alliance,
and the major business of medieval diplomacy. The relations of
countries and rulers depended not at all on common borders or

natural interest but on dynastic connections and fantastic
cousinships which could make a prince of Hungary heir to the
throne of Naples and an English prince claimant to Castile. At every
point of the loom sovereigns were thrusting in their shuttles,
carrying the strand of a son or a daughter, and these, whizzing back
and forth, wove the articial fabric that created as many conicting
claims and hostilities as it did bonds. Valois of France, Plantagenets
of England, Luxemburgs of Bohemia, Wittelsbachs of Bavaria,
Hapsburgs of Austria, Visconti of Milan, the houses of Navarre,
Castile, and Aragon, Dukes of Brittany, Counts of Flanders, Hainault,
and Savoy were all entwined in a crisscrossing network, in the
making of which two things were never considered: the sentiments
of the parties to the marriage, and the interest of the populations
involved.
Although the free consent of marriage partners was theoretically
required by the Church, and the “I will” considered the doctrinal
essence of the marriage contract made before a priest, practical
politics overlooked this requirement, sometimes with unhappy
results. Emperor Ludwig in betrothing his daughter before she had
learned to talk, oered to speak for her and was later considered to
have earned the judgment of God when she remained dumb all her
life.
Rulers likewise paid no attention whatever—with predictable
results—to the prohibition of consanguinity in marriage, whose risks
were well understood and forbidden by the Church within the
fourth degree. The prohibition was remembered only when it
became desirable to break a betrothal that had become inconvenient
or to discard an inconvenient spouse. For a fee or political favor
proportionate to the rank of the petitioner, the Church invariably
proved agreeable either to setting aside the consanguinity rule to
permit a marriage, or recalling it as grounds for divorce.
To negotiate the nancial terms of the Hapsburg-Coucy marriage
required two treaties in 1337–38 between the King of France and
the Duke of Austria. Duke Leopold gave his daughter a dowry of
40,000 livres, while King Philip assigned to her and her issue an
annuity of 2,000 livres from the royal treasury. To Enguerrand VI

the King made a gift of 10,000 livres plus promise of another 10,000
to acquit him of debts. Enguerrand in turn promised to settle 6,000
livres upon his wife and, what was of the essence to the King, to
lead his vassals in the royal host in defense of the realm against
Edward of England.
At its start, the war hardly boded a dangerous contest, since
France was the dominant power of Europe whose military glory in
her own eyes, as in others’, far outshone that of England or any
other country, and whose population of 21 million was ve times
England’s of slightly more than 4 million. Nevertheless, possession
of Aquitaine and alliance with Flanders gave Edward two footholds
at the borders of France, and lent a force of more than mere words
to the insolent challenge he addressed to “Philip of Valois who calls
himself King of France.” Neither party could know that they were
opening a war that would outlast both of them, that would develop
a life of its own, defying parleys and truces and treaties designed to
stop it, that would drag on into their sons’ lives and the lives of
their grandsons and great-grandsons, and great-great-grandsons to
the fth generation, that would bring havoc to both sides and
become, as its damage spread through Europe, the nal torment of
the closing Middle Ages.
Enguerrand VI had barely time to beget a child before he was
summoned to war in 1339. In the north the English were advancing
from Flanders and a party of 1,500 men-at-arms besieged the castle
of Oisy belonging to the Coucys. So ardent was the defense of
Enguerrand’s vassals that the English were forced to withdraw, even
though their leader was Sir John Chandos, who was to prove the
most notable military gure on the English side. In revenge for his
setback, he burned and sacked three other towns and smaller castles
within the Coucy domain. Meanwhile Enguerrand VI had joined the
King in the defense of Tournai on the Flemish border, and in 1340
while a rather feckless campaign was pursuing its way, his son, the
seventh and last Enguerrand, was born.

Out of 614 grants of legitimacy in the year 1342–43, 484 were to members of
the clergy.

Chapter 3

A
Youth and Chivalry
lthough doubtless precious to his parents as rstborn son
and heir of a great dynasty, the infant Enguerrand VII was
probably not the adored object of the coddling and
tenderness that babies are by nature supposed to inspire. Of
all the characteristics in which the medieval age diers from the
modern, none is so striking as the comparative absence of interest in
children. Emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or
literature or documentary evidence. The Christ child is of course
repeatedly pictured, usually in his mother’s arms, but prior to the
mid-14th century he is generally held stiy, away from her body,
by a mother who is aloof even when nursing. Or else the holy infant
lies alone on the ground, swaddled or sometimes quite naked and
uncovered, while an unsmiling mother gazes at him abstractedly.
Her separateness from the child was meant to indicate his divinity.
If the ordinary mother felt a warmer, more intimate emotion, it
found small expression in medieval art because the attitudes of
motherhood were preempted by the Virgin Mary.
In literature the chief role of children was to die, usually
drowned, smothered, or abandoned in a forest on the orders of some
king fearing prophecy or mad husband testing a wife’s endurance.
Women appear rarely as mothers. They are irts, bawds, and
deceiving wives in the popular tales, saints and martyrs in the
drama, unattainable objects of passionate and illicit love in the
romances. Occasionally motherhood may break through, as when an
English preacher, to point a moral in a sermon, tells how a mother
“that hath a childe in wynter when the childes hondes ben cold, the
modur taketh hym a stree [straw] or a rusche and byddeth him
warme itt, not for love of the stree to hete it … but for to hete the
childes honds.” An occasional illustration or carving in stone shows

parents teaching a child to walk, a peasant mother combing or
delousing her child’s hair with his head in her lap, a more elegant
mother of the 14th century knitting a child’s garment on four
needles, an acknowledgment from a saint’s life of the “beauty of
infancy,” and from the 12th century Ancren Riwle a description of a
peasant mother playing hide-and-seek with her child and who, when
he cries for her, “leapeth forth lightly with outspread arms and
embraceth and kisseth him and wipeth his eyes.” These are isolated
mentions which leave the empty spaces between more noticeable.
Medieval illustrations show people in every other human activity-
making love and dying, sleeping and eating, in bed and in the bath,
praying, hunting, dancing, plowing, in games and in combat,
trading, traveling, reading and writing—yet so rarely with children
as to raise the question: Why not?
Maternal love, like sex, is generally considered too innate to be
eradicable, but perhaps under certain unfavorable conditions it may
atrophy. Owing to the high infant mortality of the times, estimated
at one or two in three, the investment of love in a young child may
have been so unrewarding that by some ruse of nature, as when
overcrowded rodents in captivity will not breed, it was suppressed.
Perhaps also the frequent childbearing put less value on the product.
A child was born and died and another took its place.
Well-o noble and bourgeois families bore more children than the
poor because they married young and because, as a result of
employing wet-nurses, the period of infertility was short. They also
raised more, often as many as six to ten reaching adulthood.
Guillaume de Coucy, grandfather of Enguerrand VII, raised ve sons
and ve daughters; his son Raoul raised four of each. Nine out of
the twelve children of Edward III and Queen Philippa of England
reached maturity. The average woman of twenty, it has been
estimated, could expect about twelve years of childbearing, with
live births spaced out—owing to stillbirths, abortions, and nursing—
at fairly long intervals of about thirty months. At this rate, the
average of births per family was about ve, of whom half survived.
Like everything else, childhood escapes a at generalization. Love
and lullabies and cradle-rocking did exist. God in his grace, wrote

Philip of Novara in the 13th century, gave children three gifts: to
love and recognize the person who nurses him at her breast; to show
“joy and love” to those who play with him; to inspire love and
tenderness in those who rear him, of which the last is the most
important, for “without this, they will be so dirty and annoying in
infancy and so naughty and capricious that it is hardly worth
nurturing them through childhood.” Philip advocated, however, a
strict upbringing, for “few children perish from excess of severity
but many from being permitted too much.”
Books of advice on child-rearing were rare. There were books—
that is, bound manuscripts—of etiquette, housewifery, deportment,
home remedies, even phrase books of foreign vocabularies. A reader
could nd advice on washing hands and cleaning nails before a
banquet, on eating fennel and anise in case of bad breath, on not
spitting or picking teeth with a knife, not wiping hands on sleeves,
or nose and eyes on the tablecloth. A woman could learn how to
make ink, poison for rats, sand for hourglasses; how to make
hippocras or spiced wine, the favorite medieval drink; how to care
for pet birds in cages and get them to breed; how to obtain
character references for servants and make sure they extinguished
their bed candles with ngers or breath, “not with their shirts”; how
to grow peas and graft roses; how to rid the house of ies; how to
remove grease stains with chicken feathers steeped in hot water;
how to keep a husband happy by ensuring him a smokeless re in
winter and a bed free of eas in summer. A young married woman
would be advised on fasting and alms-giving and saying prayers at
the sound of the matins bell “before going to sleep again,” and on
walking with dignity and modesty in public, not “in ribald wise with
roving eyes and neck stretched forth like a stag in ight, looking
this way and that like unto a runaway horse.” She could nd books
on estate management for times when her husband was away at
war, with advice on making budgets and withstanding sieges and on
tenure and feudal law so that her husband’s rights would not be
invaded.
But she would nd few books for mothers with advice on
breastfeeding, swaddling, bathing, weaning, solid-feeding, and other

complexities of infant care, although these might seem to have been
of more moment for survival of the race than breeding birds in
cages or even keeping husbands comfortable. When breast-feeding
was mentioned, it was generally advocated—by one 13th century
encyclopedist, Bartholomew of England in his Book on the Nature of
Things—for its emotional value. In the process the mother “loves her
own child most tenderly, embraces and kisses it, nurses and cares
for it most solicitously.” A physician of the same period,
Aldobrandino of Siena, who practiced in France, advised frequent
cleaning and changing and two baths a day, weaning on porridge
made of bread with honey and milk, ample playtime and unforced
teaching at school, with time for sleep and diversion. But how
widely his humane teaching was known or followed it is impossible
to say.
On the whole, babies and young children appear to have been left
to survive or die without great concern in the rst ve or six years.
What psychological eect this may have had on character, and
possibly on history, can only be conjectured. Possibly the relative
emotional blankness of a medieval infancy may account for the
casual attitude toward life and suering of the medieval man.
Children did, however, have toys: dolls and doll carriages
harnessed to mice, wooden knights and weapons, little animals of
baked clay, windmills, balls, battledores and shuttlecocks, stilts and
seesaws and merry-go-rounds. Little boys were like little boys of any
time, “living without thought or care,” according to Bartholomew of
England, “loving only to play, fearing no danger more than being
beaten with a rod, always hungry and hence disposed to inrmities
from being overfed, wanting everything they see, quick to laughter
and as quick to tears, resisting their mothers’ eorts to wash and
comb them, and no sooner clean but dirty again.” Girls were better
behaved, according to Bartholomew, and dearer to their mothers. If
children survived to age seven, their recognized life began, more or
less as miniature adults. Childhood was already over. The
childishness noticeable in medieval behavior, with its marked
inability to restrain any kind of impulse, may have been simply due
to the fact that so large a proportion of active society was actually

very young in years. About half the population, it has been
estimated, was under twenty-one, and about one third under
fourteen.
A boy of noble family was left for his rst seven years in the
charge of women, who schooled him in manners and to some extent
in letters. Signicantly, St. Anne, the patron saint of mothers, is
usually portrayed teaching her child, the Virgin Mary, how to read
from a book. From age eight to fourteen the noble’s son was sent as
a page to the castle of a neighboring lord, in the same way that boys
of lower orders went at seven or eight to another family as
apprentices or servants. Personal service was not considered
degrading: a page or even a squire as a grown man assisted his lord
to bathe and dress, took care of his clothes, waited on him at table
while sharing noble status. In return for free labor, the lord
provided a free school for the sons of his peers. The boy would learn
to ride, to ght, and to hawk, the three chief physical elements of
noble life, to play chess and backgammon, to sing and dance, play
an instrument, and compose, and other romantic skills. The castle’s
private chaplain or a local abbey would supply his religious
education, and teach him the rudiments of reading and writing and
possibly some elements of the grammar-school curriculum that non-
noble boys studied.
At fourteen or fteen, when he became a squire, the training for
combat intensied. He learned to pierce the swinging dummy of the
quintain with a lance, wield the sword and a variety of other
murderous weapons, and know the rules of heraldry and jousting.
As squire he led his lord’s war-horse to battle and held it when the
ghting was on foot. He assisted the seneschal in the business of the
castle, kept the keys, acted as condential courier, carried the purse
and valuables on a journey. Book learning had little place in this
program, although a young noble, depending on his bent, could
make some acquaintance of geometry, law, elocution, and, in a few
cases, Latin.
Women of noble estate were frequently more accomplished in
Latin and other school learning than the men, for though girls did
not leave home at seven like boys, their education was encouraged

by the Church so that they might be better instructed in the faith
and more tted for the religious life in a nunnery, should their
parents wish to dedicate them, with suitable endowment, to the
Church. Besides reading and writing in French and Latin, they were
taught music, astronomy, and some medicine and rst aid.
The last of the Coucys entered a world in which movement was
limited to the speed of man or horse, news and public
announcements were communicated by the human voice, and light
ended for most people with the setting of the sun. At dusk, horns
were blown or bells rung to sound curfew or “cover res,” after
which work was prohibited because a workman could not see to
perform creditably. The rich could prolong time by torchlight and
candles, but for others night was as dark as nature intended, and
stillness surrounded a traveler after dark. “Birds, wild beasts and
men without any noise did take their rest,” wrote Boccaccio. “The
unfallen leaves did hang upon the trees and the moist air abode in
mild peace. Only the stars did shine to light his way.”
Flowers covered the elds and forest oor and formed a cherished
element of daily life. Wild owers and garden owers were woven
into chaplets worn by noble men and women, strewn on oors and
tables at banquets, and scattered in the streets before royal
processions. Monkeys were common pets. Beggars were ubiquitous,
most of them crippled, blind, diseased, deformed, or disguised as
such. The legless dragged themselves along by means of wooden
stumps strapped to their hands. Women were considered the snare
of the Devil, while at the same time the cult of the Virgin made one
woman the central object of love and adoration. Doctors were
admired, lawyers universally hated and mistrusted. Steam was
unharnessed, syphilis not yet introduced, leprosy still extant,
gunpowder coming into use, though not yet eectively. Potatoes,
tea, coee, and tobacco were unknown; hot spiced wine was the
favorite drink of those who could aord it; the common people
drank beer, ale, and cider.

Men of the non-clerical classes had abandoned the gown for
divided legs clad in tights. They were generally clean-shaven,
although chin beards and mustaches came in and out of fashion.
Knights and courtiers had adopted a fashion of excessively long
pointed shoes called poulaines—which often had to be tied up
around the calf to enable the wearer to walk—and excessively short
tunics which, according to one chronicler’s complaint, revealed the
buttocks and “other parts of the body that should be hidden,”
exciting the mockery of the common people. Women used
cosmetics, dyed their hair, plucked it to broaden their foreheads,
and plucked their eyebrows too, although by these practices they
committed the sin of vanity.
Fortune’s Wheel, plunging down the mighty and (more rarely)
raising the lowly, was the prevailing image of the instability of life
in an uncertain world. Progress, moral or material, in man or
society, was not expected during this life on earth, of which the
conditions were xed. The individual might through his own eorts
increase in virtue, but betterment of the whole would have to await
the Second Coming and the beginning of a new age.
Time, calendar, and history were reckoned by the Christian
scheme. Creation of the world was dated 4,484 years before the
founding of Rome, and modern history from the birth of Christ.
Historical events thereafter were chronicled by papal reigns
beginning with St. Peter’s, which was xed at A.D. 42–67. Current
events were recorded in relation to religious holidays and saints’
days. The year began in March—the month, according to Chaucer,
“in which the world began, when God rst made man.” Ocially it
began at Easter, and because this was a movable feast falling
anywhere within a period of thirty days, historical dating was
imprecise. Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer:
matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the rst
hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the
evening; and compline at bedtime. The reckoning of time was based
on the movements of sun and stars, nature’s timekeepers, which
were familiar and carefully observed. About the time Enguerrand

VII was born, the mechanical clock was coming into use on town-
hall towers and in homes of the rich, bringing precision with all its
possibilities for scientic observation.
People lived close to the inexplicable. The ickering lights of
marsh gas could only be fairies or goblins; reies were the souls of
unbaptized dead infants. In the terrible trembling and ssures of an
earthquake or the setting are of a tree by lightning, the
supernatural was close at hand. Storms were omens, death by heart
attack or other seizures could be the work of demons. Magic was
present in the world: demons, fairies, sorcerers, ghosts, and ghouls
touched and manipulated human lives; heathen superstitions and
rituals abided among the country folk, beneath and even alongside
the priest and sacraments. The inuence of the planets could explain
anything otherwise unaccounted for. Astronomy was the noblest
science, and astrology, after God, the greatest determinant of aairs.
Alchemy, or the search for the philosopher’s stone that would
transmute base metals into gold, was the most popular applied
science. At the end of that rainbow lay also the panacea for ills and
the elixir of longevity. Inquiring minds investigated natural science
through experiment and observation. A scholar of Oxford kept a
seven-year record of the weather through the years 1337–44 and
noted that the sound of bells heard more clearly or at a greater
distance than usual was a sign of increased humidity and a
prediction of rain. Mental depression and anxiety were recognized
as an illness, although the symptoms of depression, despair or
melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of
accidia or sloth. Surveying by triangulation was practiced, and the
height of walls and towers measured by a monk lying prone with
the aid of a stick. Eyeglasses had been in use since the turn of the
century, allowing old people to read more in their later years and
greatly extending the scholar’s life of study. The manufacture of
paper as a cheaper and more plentiful material than parchment was
beginning to make possible multiple copies and wider distribution of
literary works.
Energy depended on human and animal muscle and on the gear
shaft turned by wind or water. Their power drove mills for tanning

and laundering, sawing wood, pressing olive oil, casting iron,
mashing malt for beer and pulp for paper and pigment for paints,
operating fullers’ vats for nishing woolen cloth, bellows for blast
furnaces, hydraulic hammers for foundries, and wheels for
grindstones used by armorers. The mills had so augmented the use
of iron that timberland was already being deforested to supply fuel
for the forge. They had so extended human capacity that Pope
Celestine III in the 1190s ruled that windmills must pay tithes.
Unpowered tools—the lathe, brace and bit, spinning wheel, and
wheeled plow—had also in the last century increased skills and
powers of production.
Travel, “the mother of tidings,” brought news of the world to
castle and village, town and countryside. The rutted roads, always
either too dusty or too muddy, carried an endless ow of pilgrims
and peddlers, merchants with their packtrains, bishops making
visitations, tax-collectors and royal ocials, friars and pardoners,
wandering scholars, jongleurs and preachers, messengers and
couriers who wove the network of communications from city to city.
Great nobles like the Coucys, bankers, prelates, abbeys, courts of
justice, town governments, kings and their councils employed their
own messengers. The King of England at mid-century kept twelve on
hand who accompanied him at all times, ready to start, and were
paid 3d. a day when on the road and 4s. 8d. a year for shoes.
Betting the greater majesty of France, the French King employed
up to one hundred, and a grand seigneur two or three.
An average day’s journey on horseback was about 30 to 40 miles,
though it varied widely, depending on circumstance. A messenger
on horseback, without riding at night, could cover 40 to 50 miles a
day and about half as much on foot. In an emergency, given a good
horse and good road (which was rare) and no load, he could make
15 miles an hour and, with changes of horse awaiting him, cover
100 miles a day. The great merchant cities of Venice and Bruges
maintained a regular postal service between them so highly
organized that it covered the 700 miles in seven days. Packtrains
made about 15 to 20 miles a day; armies, when slowed by baggage

wagons and retainers on foot, sometimes covered no more than 8
miles a day.
The length of France from Flanders to Navarre was generally
reckoned a journey of 20 to 22 days, and the width, from the coast
of Brittany to Lyon on the Rhône, 16 days. Travelers to Italy across
the Alps usually went by way of the Mont Cenis pass from
Chambéry in the territory of Savoy to Turin. Snowbound from
November through May, the pass took 5 to 7 days to traverse.
Traveling from Paris to Naples via this route took ve weeks. The
voyage from London to Lyon took about 18 days and from
Canterbury to Rome about 30 days depending on the Channel
crossing, which was unpredictable, often dangerous, sometimes
fatal, and could take anywhere from three days to a month. One
knight, Sir Hervé de Léon, was kept 15 days at sea by a storm and,
besides having lost his horse overboard, arrived so battered and
weakened “that he never had health thereafter.” It was no wonder
that, according to a ballad, when pilgrims took to sea for the voyage
to Compostella or beyond, “Theyr hertes begin to fayle.”
Except for galleys powered by oarsmen, ships were at the mercy
of the weather, although rigging had been improved and the
swinging stern rudder gave greater control. Maps and harbor charts
were in use and the compass was allowing navigation to leave the
coastline and merchant cargo to take the risk of crossing the open
sea. As a result, larger ships capable of carrying 500 tons or more of
cargo were being used for these voyages. Barge transportation by
river and canal was much cheaper than packtrain, even given the
tolls imposed by local lords at every convenient point. Along the
busy Seine and Garonne, tolls succeeded each other every six or
seven miles.
Wagons and peasants’ two-wheeled carts were used for short
hauls, but since roads were usually impassable by wheeled vehicles
in winter and there was no connected system of roads and bridges,
the mule train remained the essential carrier. Four-wheeled covered
wagons drawn by three or four horses in tandem were available for
ladies and the sick. Ladies who rode sat astride under owing skirts,
but the sidesaddle was to appear before the end of the century. For

a knight to ride in a carriage was against the principles of chivalry
and he never under any circumstances rode a mare.
Travelers stopped before nightfall, those of the nobility taking
shelter in some nearby castle or monastery where they would be
admitted indoors, while the mass of ordinary travelers on foot,
including pilgrims, were housed and fed in a guest house outside the
gate. They were entitled to one night’s lodging at any monastery
and could not be turned away unless they asked for a second night.
Inns were available to merchants and others, though they were
likely to be crowded, squalid, and ea-ridden, with several beds to a
room and two travelers to a bed—or three to a bed in Germany,
according to the disgusted report of the poet Deschamps, who was
sent there on a mission for the French King. Moreover, he
complained, neither bed nor table had clean linen, the innkeeper
oered no choice of foods, a traveler in the Empire could nd
nothing to drink but beer; eas, rats, and mice were unavoidable,
and the people of Bohemia lived like pigs.
Given the hardships and the length of time consumed, people
journeyed over long distances to an astonishing degree—from Paris
to Florence, from Flanders to Hungary, London to Prague, Bohemia
to Castile, crossing seas, alps, and rivers, walking to China like
Marco Polo or three times to Jerusalem like the Wife of Bath.
What was the mental furniture of Enguerrand’s class, the upper
level of lay society? Long before Columbus, they knew the world
was a globe, a knowledge proceeding from familiarity with the
movement of the stars, which could be made comprehensible only
in terms of a spherical earth. In a vivid image, it was said by the
cleric Gautier de Metz in his Image du Monde, the most widely read
encyclopedia of the time, that a man could go around the world as a
y makes the tour of an apple. So far was the earth from the stars,
according to him, that if a stone were dropped from there it would
take more than 100 years to reach our globe, while a man traveling
25 leagues a day without stopping would take 7,157½ years to
reach the stars.

Visually, people pictured the universe held in God’s arms with
man at its center. It was understood that the moon was the nearest
planet, with no light of its own; that an eclipse was the passage of
the moon between the earth and the sun; that rain was moisture
drawn by the sun from the earth which condensed into clouds and
fell back as rain; that the shorter the time between thunder and
lightning, the nearer the source.
Faraway lands, however—India, Persia, and beyond—were seen
through a gauze of fabulous fairy tales revealing an occasional
nugget of reality: forests so high they touch the clouds, horned
pygmies who move in herds and grow old in seven years, brahmins
who kill themselves on funeral pyres, men with dogs’ heads and six
toes, “cyclopeans” with only one eye and one foot who move as fast
as the wind, the “monoceros” which can be caught only when it
sleeps in the lap of a virgin, Amazons whose tears are of silver,
panthers who practice the caesarean operation with their own
claws, trees whose leaves supply wool, snakes 300 feet long, snakes
with precious stones for eyes, snakes who so love music that for
prudence they stop up one ear with their tail.
The Garden of Eden too had an earthly existence which often
appeared on maps, located far to the east, where it was believed cut
o from the rest of the world by a great mountain or ocean barrier
or ery wall. In the earthly Paradise grow every kind of tree and
owers of surpassing colors and a thousand scents which never fade
and have healing qualities. Birds’ songs harmonize with the rustling
of forest leaves and the rippling of streams owing over jeweled
rocks or over sands brighter than silver. A palace with columns of
crystal and jasper sheds marvelous light. No wind or rain, heat or
cold mars Paradise; no sickness, decay, death, or sorrow enters
there. The mountain peak on which it is situated is so high it
touches the sphere of the moon—but here the scientic mind
intervened: that would be impossible, pronounced the 14th century
author of Polychronicon, because it would cause an eclipse.
For all the explanations, the earth and its phenomena were full of
mysteries: What happens to re when it goes out? Why are there
dierent colors of skin among men? Why do the sun’s rays darken a

man’s skin but bleach white linen? How can the earth, which is
weighty, be suspended in air? How do souls make their way to the
next world? Where lies the soul? What causes madness? Medieval
people felt surrounded by puzzles, yet because God was there they
were willing to acknowledge that causes are hidden, that man
cannot know why all things are as they are; “they are as God
pleases.”
That did not silence the one unending question: Why does God
allow evil, illness, and poverty? Why did He not make man
incapable of sin? Why did He not assure him of Paradise? The
answer, never wholly satisfying, was that God owed the Devil his
scope. According to St. Augustine, the fount of authority, all men
were under the Devil’s power by virtue of original sin; hence the
necessity of the Church and salvation.
Questions of human behavior found answers in the book of
Sidrach, supposedly a descendant of Noah to whom God gave the
gift of universal knowledge, eventually compiled into a book by
several masters of Toledo. What language does a deaf-mute hear in
his heart? Answer: that of Adam, namely Hebrew. Which is worst:
murder, robbery, or assault? None of these; sodomy is the worst.
Will wars ever end? Never, until the earth becomes Paradise. The
origin of war, according to its 14th century codier Honoré Bonet,
lay in Lucifer’s war against God, “hence it is no great marvel if in
this world there arise wars and battles since these existed rst in
heaven.”
Education, so far as it would have reached Enguerrand, was based
on the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science;
Logic, which dierentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the
source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without
numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement;
Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected
with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music. Medicine, though not
one of the liberal arts, was analogous to Music because its object
was the harmony of the human body.
History was nite and contained within comprehensible limits. It
began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not

indenitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the
hope of aicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within
that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because
his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he
was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might
attain individual progress and even victory, but collective
betterment would only come in the nal union with God.
The average layman acquired knowledge mainly by ear, through
public sermons, mystery plays, and the recital of narrative poems,
ballads, and tales, but during Enguerrand’s lifetime, reading by
educated nobles and upper bourgeois increased with the increased
availability of manuscripts. Books of universal knowledge, mostly
dating from the 13th century and written in (or translated from the
Latin into) French and other vernaculars for the use of the layman,
were literary staples familiar in every country over several
centuries. A 14th century man drew also on the Bible, romances,
bestiaries, satires, books of astronomy, geography, universal history,
church history, rhetoric, law, medicine, alchemy, falconry, hunting,
ghting, music, and any number of special subjects. Allegory was
the guiding concept. Every incident in the Old Testament was
considered to pre-gure in allegory what was to come in the New.
Everything in nature concealed an allegorical meaning relating to
some aspect of Christian doctrine. Allegorical gures—Greed,
Reason, Courtesy, Love, False-Seeming, Do-Well, Fair Welcome, Evil
Rumor—peopled the tales and political treatises.
Epics of great heroes, of Brutus and King Arthur, of the “strong
stryfe” of Greece and Troy, of Alexander and Julius Caesar, of how
Charlemagne and Roland fought the Saracens and how Tristan and
Iseult loved and sinned, were the favorites of noble households,
though not to the exclusion of coarser stu. The fabliaux or tales of
common life, bawdy and scatological, were told in noble halls as
well as taverns. The Ménagier of Paris, a wealthy bourgeois
contemporary of Enguerrand VII, who at the age of sixty in 1392
wrote a book of domestic and moral instruction for his young wife,
had read or possessed the Bible, The Golden Legend, St. Jerome’s
Lives of the Fathers, the works of St. Augustine, St. Gregory, Livy,

Cicero, the Roman de la Rose, Petrarch’s Tale of Griselda, and other
less familiar titles. The Chevalier Georoy de La Tour Landry, a
slightly older contemporary of Enguerrand, who in 1371 wrote a
book of cautionary tales for his daughters, was as well acquainted
with Sarah, Bathsheba, and Delilah as with Helen of Troy,
Hippolyta, and Dido. If the Ménagier was too respectable to read
Ovid, the Roman poet was well known to others. Aristotle was the
basis of political philosophy, Ptolemy of “natural” philosophy,
Hippocrates and Galen of medicine.
Contemporary writers rapidly found an audience. In Dante’s
lifetime his verse was chanted by blacksmiths and mule-drivers; fty
years later in 1373 the growth of reading caused the Signoria of
Florence, at the petition of citizens, to oer a year’s course of public
lectures on Dante’s work for which the sum of 100 gold orins was
raised to pay the lecturer, who was to speak every day except holy
days. The person appointed was Boccaccio, who had written the rst
biography of Dante and copied out the entire Divine Comedy himself
as a gift for Petrarch.
In an Italian biographical dictionary at the end of the century, the
longest articles were given to Julius Caesar and Hannibal, two pages
to Dante, one page each to Archimedes, Aristotle, King Arthur, and
Attila the Hun, two and a half columns to Petrarch, one column to
Boccaccio, shorter mentions to Cimabue and Giotto, and three lines
to Marco Polo.
For Enguerrand at age seven, the usual pattern was abruptly
interrupted when his father was killed in the war against the English
at about the time of the fatal Battle of Crécy in 1346, but whether in
that or another engagement is uncertain.
When a ef owing an important number of ghting men to the
King was left in the hands of a widow or minor heir, the question of
control became crucial, the more so now when the kingdom was
already at war. As governors of the barony of Coucy during
Enguerrand’s minority, the King appointed the chief of his Council,
Jean de Nesles, Sire d’Oémont, a member of the old nobility, and

another of the royal inner circle, Matthieu de Roye, Sire d’Aunoy,
Master of the Crossbowmen of France, an oce exercising command
over all archers and infantry. Both were seigneurs of Picardy with
lands not far from Coucy. Enguerrand’s uncle, Jean de Coucy, Sire
d’Havraincourt, was named his guardian and tutor or adviser. His
mother, Catherine of Austria, left in a situation vulnerable to
predatory ambitions, quickly concluded an agreement with the
numerous brothers and sisters of her late husband who during his
lifetime had held the property in common. They were conrmed in
possession of various castles and manors, and Enguerrand VII, who
had no brothers or sisters, was conrmed as successor to the major
portion of the domain, including the territories of Coucy, Marie, La
Fère, Boissy-en-Brie, Oisy-en-Cambrésis, and their towns and
dependencies.
In 1348 or ’49 Enguerrand’s mother remarried, presumably by her
own or her own family’s choice, a fellow Austrian or German named
Conrad de Magdebourg (also called Hardeck). Catherine bore no
children of this marriage; within a year she and her husband were
dead, victims of the great holocaust that was about to overtake
Europe and leave Enguerrand an orphan.
During her lifetime Catherine was said to have taken great care of
her son’s education, wishing him to distinguish himself in “the arts,
letters and sciences pertaining to his rank” and frequently reminding
him of the “virtue and high reputation of his ancestors.” Coming
from a 16th century account of Enguerrand de Coucy, this statement
may have been the kind of tribute routinely paid at that time to
noble personages: equally well it could have had some basis in fact.
Like other medieval childhoods, however, Enguerrand’s is a blank.
Nothing is known of him until his sudden emergence onto the pages
of history in 1358 at the age of eighteen.
Of chivalry, the culture that nurtured him, much is known. More
than a code of manners in war and love, chivalry was a moral
system, governing the whole of noble life. That it was about four
parts in ve illusion made it no less governing for all that. It

developed at the same time as the great crusades of the 12th
century as a code intended to fuse the religious and martial spirits
and somehow bring the ghting man into accord with Christian
theory. Since a knight’s usual activities were as much at odds with
Christian theory as a merchant’s, a moral gloss was needed that
would allow the Church to tolerate the warriors in good conscience
and the warriors to pursue their own values in spiritual comfort.
With the help of Benedictine thinkers, a code evolved that put the
knight’s sword arm in the service, theoretically, of justice, right,
piety, the Church, the widow, the orphan, and the oppressed.
Knighthood was received in the name of the Trinity after a
ceremony of purication, confession, communion. A saint’s relic was
usually embedded in the hilt of the knight’s sword so that upon
clasping it as he took his oath, he caused the vow to be registered in
Heaven. Chivalry’s famous celebrator Ramon Lull, a contemporary
of St. Louis, could now state as his thesis that “God and chivalry are
in concord.”
But, like business enterprise, chivalry could not be contained by
the Church, and bursting through the pious veils, it developed its
own principles. Prowess, that combination of courage, strength, and
skill that made a chevalier preux, was the prime essential. Honor
and loyalty, together with courtesy—meaning the kind of behavior
that has since come to be called “chivalrous”—were the ideals, and
so-called courtly love the presiding genius. Designed to make the
knight more polite and to lift the tone of society, courtly love
required its disciple to be in a chronically amorous condition, on the
theory that he would thus be rendered more courteous, gay, and
gallant, and society in consequence more joyous. Largesse was the
necessary accompaniment. An open-handed generosity in gifts and
hospitality was the mark of a gentleman and had its practical value
in attracting other knights to ght under the banner and bounty of
the grand seigneur. Over-celebrated by troubadours and chroniclers
who depended on its ow, largesse led to reckless extravagance and
careless bankruptcies.

Prowess was not mere talk, for the function of physical violence
required real stamina. To ght on horseback or foot wearing 55
pounds of plate armor, to crash in collision with an opponent at full
gallop while holding horizontal an eighteen-foot lance half the
length of an average telephone pole, to give and receive blows with
sword or battle-ax that could cleave a skull or slice o a limb at a
stroke, to spend half of life in the saddle through all weathers and
for days at a time, was not a weakling’s work. Hardship and fear
were part of it. “Knights who are at the wars … are forever
swallowing their fear,” wrote the companion and biographer of Don
Pero Niño, the “Unconquered Knight” of the late 14th century.
“They expose themselves to every peril; they give up their bodies to
the adventure of life in death. Moldy bread or biscuit, meat cooked
or uncooked; today enough to eat and tomorrow nothing, little or no
wine, water from a pond or a butt, bad quarters, the shelter of a tent
or branches, a bad bed, poor sleep with their armor still on their
backs, burdened with iron, the enemy an arrow-shot o. ‘Ware!
Who goes there? To arms! To arms!’ With the rst drowsiness, an
alarm; at dawn, the trumpet. ‘To horse! To horse! Muster! Muster!’
As lookouts, as sentinels, keeping watch by day and by night,
ghting without cover, as foragers, as scouts, guard after guard,
duty after duty. ‘Here they come! Here! They are so many—No, not
as many as that—This way—that—Come this side—Press them there
—News! News! They come back hurt, they have prisoners—no, they
bring none back. Let us go! Let us go! Give no ground! On!’ Such is
their calling.”
Horrid wounds were part of the calling. In one combat Don Pero
Niño was struck by an arrow that “knit together his gorget and his
neck,” but he fought on against the enemy on the. bridge. “Several
lance stumps were still in his shield and it was that which hindered
him most.” A bolt from a crossbow “pierced his nostrils most
painfully whereat he was dazed, but his daze lasted but a little
time.” He pressed forward, receiving many sword blows on head
and shoulders which “sometimes hit the bolt embedded in his nose
making him suer great pain.” When weariness on both sides
brought the battle to an end, Pero Nino’s shield “was tattered and

all in pieces; his sword blade was toothed like a saw and dyed with
blood … his armor was broken in several places by lance-heads of
which some had entered the esh and drawn blood, although the
coat was of great strength.” Prowess was not easily bought.
Loyalty, meaning the pledged word, was chivalry’s fulcrum. The
extreme emphasis given to it derived from the time when a pledge
between lord and vassal was the only form of government. A knight
who broke his oath was charged with “treason” for betraying the
order of knighthood. The concept of loyalty did not preclude
treachery or the most egregious trickery as long as no knightly oath
was broken. When a party of armed knights gained entrance to a
walled town by declaring themselves allies and then proceeded to
slaughter the defenders, chivalry was evidently not violated, no oath
having been made to the burghers.
Chivalry was regarded as a universal order of all Christian
knights, a trans-national class moved by a single ideal, much as
Marxism later regarded all workers of the world. It was a military
guild in which all knights were theoretically brothers, although
Froissart excepted the Germans and Spaniards, who, he said, were
too uncultivated to understand chivalry.
In the performance of his function, the knight must be prepared,
as John of Salisbury wrote, “to shed your blood for your brethren”—
he meant brethren in the universal sense—“and, if needs must, to
lay down your life.” Many were thus prepared, though perhaps
more from sheer love of battle than concern for a cause. Blind King
John of Bohemia met death in that way. He loved ghting for its
own sake, not caring whether the conict was important. He missed
hardly a quarrel in Europe and entered tournaments in between,
allegedly receiving in one of them the wound that blinded him. His
subjects, on the other hand, said the cause was Divine punishment—
not because he dug up the old synagogue of Prague, which he did,
but because, on nding money concealed beneath the pavement, he
was moved by greed and the advice of German knights to dig up the
tomb of St. Adelbert in the Prague cathedral and was stricken blind
by the desecrated saint.

As an ally of Philip VI, at the head of 500 knights, the sightless
King fought the English through Picardy, always rash and in the
avant-garde. At Crécy he asked his knights to lead him deeper into
the battle so that he might strike further blows with his sword.
Twelve of them tied their horses’ reins together and, with the King
at their head, advanced into the thick of the ght, “so far as never
to return.” His body was found next day among his knights, all slain
with their horses still tied together.
Fighting lled the noble’s need of something to do, a way to exert
himself. It was his substitute for work. His leisure time was spent
chiey in hunting, otherwise in games of chess, backgammon, and
dice, in songs, dances, pageants, and other entertainments. Long
winter evenings were occupied listening to the recital of
interminable verse epics. The sword oered the workless noble an
activity with a purpose, one that could bring him honor, status, and,
if he was lucky, gain. If no real conict was at hand, he sought
tournaments, the most exciting, expensive, ruinous, and delightful
activity of the noble class, and paradoxically the most harmful to his
true military function. Fighting in tournaments concentrated his
skills and absorbed his interest in an increasingly formalized clash,
leaving little thought for the tactics and strategy of real battle.
Originating in France and referred to by others as “French
combat” (conictus Gallicus), tournaments started without rules or
lists as an agreed-upon clash of opposing units. Though justied as
training exercises, the impulse was the love of ghting. Becoming
more regulated and mannered, they took two forms: jousts by
individuals, and melees by groups of up to forty on a side, either à
plaisance with blunted weapons or à outrance with no restraints, in
which case participants might be severely wounded and not
infrequently killed. Tournaments proliferated as the noble’s primary
occupation dwindled. Under the extended rule of monarchy, he had
less need to protect his own ef, while a class of professional
ministers was gradually taking his place around the crown. The less
he had to do, the more energy he spent in tournaments articially
re-enacting his role.

A tournament might last as long as a week and on great occasions
two. Opening day was spent matching and seeding the players,
followed by days set apart for jousts, for melees, for a rest day
before the nal tourney, all interspersed with feasting and parties.
These occasions were the great sporting events of the time,
attracting crowds of bourgeois spectators from rich merchants to
common artisans, mountebanks, food vendors, prostitutes, and
pickpockets. About a hundred knights usually participated, each
accompanied by two mounted squires, an armorer, and six servants
in livery. The knight had of course to equip himself with painted
and gilded armor and crested helmet costing from 25 to 50 livres,
with a war-horse costing from 25 to 100 livres in addition to his
traveling palfrey, and with banners and trappings and ne clothes.
Though the expense could easily bankrupt him, he might also come
away richer, for the loser in combat had to pay a ransom and the
winner was awarded his opponent’s horse and armor, which he
could sell back to him or to anyone. Gain was not recognized by
chivalry, but it was present at tournaments.
Because of their extravagance, violence, and vainglory,
tournaments were continually being denounced by popes and kings,
from whom they drained money. In vain. When the Dominicans
denounced them as a pagan circus, no one listened. When the
formidable St. Bernard thundered that anyone killed in a
tournament would go to Hell, he spoke for once to deaf ears. Death
in a tournament was ocially considered the sin of suicide by the
Church, besides jeopardizing family and tenantry without cause, but
even threats of excommunication had no eect. Although St. Louis
condemned tournaments and Philip the Fair prohibited them during
his wars, nothing could stop them permanently or dim the
enthusiasm for them.
With brilliantly dressed spectators in the stands, ags and ribbons
uttering, the music of trumpets, the parade of combatants making
their draped horses prance and champ on golden bridles, the glitter
of harness and shields, the throwing of ladies’ scarves and sleeves to
their favorites, the bow of the heralds to the presiding prince who
proclaimed the rules, the cry of poursuivants announcing their

champions, the tournament was the peak of nobility’s pride and
delight in its own valor and beauty.
If tournaments were an acting-out of chivalry, courtly love was its
dreamland. Courtly love was understood by its contemporaries to be
love for its own sake, romantic love, true love, physical love,
unassociated with property or family, and consequently focused on
another man’s wife, since only such an illicit liaison could have no
other aim but love alone. (Love of a maiden was virtually ruled out
since this would have raised dangerous problems, and besides,
maidens of noble estate usually jumped from childhood to marriage
with hardly an interval for romance.) The fact that courtly love
idealized guilty love added one more complication to the maze
through which medieval people threaded their lives. As formulated
by chivalry, romance was pictured as extra-marital because love was
considered irrelevant to marriage, was indeed discouraged in order
not to get in the way of dynastic arrangements.
As its justication, courtly love was considered to ennoble a man,
to improve him in every way. It would make him concerned to show
an example of goodness, to do his utmost to preserve honor, never
letting dishonor touch himself or the lady he loved. On a lower
scale, it would lead him to keep his teeth and nails clean, his clothes
rich and well groomed, his conversation witty and amusing, his
manners courteous to all, curbing arrogance and coarseness, never
brawling in a lady’s presence. Above all, it would make him more
valiant, more preux; that was the basic premise. He would be
inspired to greater prowess, would win more victories in
tournaments, rise above himself in courage and daring, become, as
Froissart said, “worth two men.” Guided by this theory, woman’s
status improved, less for her own sake than as the inspirer of male
glory, a higher function than being merely a sexual object, a breeder
of children, or a conveyor of property.
The chivalric love aair moved from worship through declaration
of passionate devotion, virtuous rejection by the lady, renewed
wooing with oaths of eternal fealty, moans of approaching death

from unsatised desire, heroic deeds of valor which won the lady’s
heart by prowess, consummation of the secret love, followed by
endless adventures and subterfuges to a tragic denouement. The
most widely known of all such romances and the last of its kind was
the Châtelain de Coucy, written about the time of Enguerrand VII’s
birth when the chanson de geste was dying out. Its hero was not a
Seigneur de Coucy but a châtelain of the castle named Renault,
modeled on a real individual and poet of the 12th century.
In the legend he falls madly in love with the Dame de Fayel and
through an enormous series of maneuvers occupying 8,266 lines of
verse is decoyed into the Third Crusade by the jealous husband,
covers himself with glory, and when fatally wounded by a poisoned
arrow, composes a last song and farewell letter to be dispatched
after his death in a box with his embalmed heart and a lock of the
lady’s hair. Carried by a faithful servant, the box is intercepted by
the husband, who has the heart cooked and served to his wife. On
being informed what she has eaten, she swears that after such a
noble food she will never eat again and dies, while the husband
exiles himself in a lifelong pilgrimage to obtain pardon for his deed.
“Melancholy, amorous and barbaric,” these tales exalted
adulterous love as the only true kind, while in the real life of the
same society adultery was a crime, not to mention a sin. If found
out, it dishonored the lady and shamed the husband, a fellow
knight. It was understood that he had the right to kill both
unfaithful wife and lover.
Nothing ts in this canon. The gay, the elevating, the ennobling
pursuit is founded upon sin and invites the dishonor it is supposed
to avert. Courtly love was a greater tangle of irreconcilables even
than usury. It remained articial, a literary convention, a fantasy
(like modern pornography) more for purposes of discussion than for
everyday practice.
The realities were more normal. As described by La Tour Landry,
his amorous fellow knights were not overly concerned with loyalty
and courtoisie. He tells how, when he used to ride abroad with his
friends as a young man, they would beg ladies for their love and if
this one did not accept they would try another, deceiving the ladies

with fair words of blandishment and swearing false oaths, “for in
every place they would have their sport if they could.” Many a
gentlewoman was taken in by the “foul and great false oaths that
false men use to swear to women.” He tells how three ladies who
were exchanging opinions of their lovers discovered that the senior
Jean le Maingre, Sire de Boucicaut, was the favorite of each, he
having made love to all, telling each he loved her best. When they
taxed him with his falsity, he was in no way abashed, saying, “For at
that time I spake with each of you, I loved her best that I spake with
and thought truly the same.”
La Tour Landry himself, a seigneur of substance who fought in
many campaigns, emerges as a domestic gentleman who liked to sit
in his garden and enjoy the song of the thrush in April, and loved
his books. Contrary to chivalry, he had also loved his wife, “the bell
and ower of all that was fair and good,” and “I delighted me so
much in her that I made for her love songs, ballads, roundels,
verelays and divers new things in the best wise that I could.” He
does not think much of chivalry’s favorite theme, that courtly love
inspires knights to greater prowess, for though they say they do it
for the ladies, “in faith they do it for themselves to win praise and
honor.” Nor does he approve of love for its own sake, par amours,
either before or after marriage, for it can cause all kinds of crime, of
which he cites the Châtelain de Coucy as an example.
As suggested by a spectacular scandal of the time, Edward III’s
rape of the Countess of Salisbury, courtly love was the ideal of
chivalry least realized in everyday behavior. Froissart, who believed
in chivalry as St. Louis believed in the Trinity, expurgated the story,
supposedly after careful inquiries, but more probably out of respect
for his beloved rst patron, Philippa of Hainault, Edward’s Queen.
He reports only that the King, on visiting Salisbury Castle after a
battle in Scotland in 1342, was “stricken to the heart with a sparkle
of ne love” for the beautiful Countess. After she repulsed his
advances, Edward is reported (with some historic license) debating
with himself about pursuing his guilty passion in words that are a
supreme statement of the chivalric theory of love’s role: “And if he
should be more amorous it would be entirely good for him, for his

realm and for all his knights and squires for he would be more
content, more gay and more martial; he would hold more jousts,
more tourneys, more feasts and more revels than he had before; and
he would be more able and more vigorous in his wars, more amiable
and more trusting toward his friends and harsher toward his foes.”
According to another contemporary, Jean le Bel, who had himself
been a knight with few illusions before he took orders as a canon
and became a chronicler, matters went rather dierently. After
sending the Earl of Salisbury to Brittany like Uriah, the King
revisited the Countess and, on being again rejected, he villainously
raped her, “stopping her mouth with such force that she could only
cry two or three cries … and left her lying in a swoon bleeding from
the nose and mouth and other parts.” Edward returned to London
greatly disturbed at what he had done, and the good lady “had no
more joy or happiness again, so heavy was her heart.” Upon her
husband’s return she would not lie with him and, being asked why,
she told him what had happened, “sitting on the bed next to him
crying.” The Earl, reecting on the great friendship and honor
between him and the King, now so dishonored, told his wife he
could live in England no more. He went to court and before his
peers divested himself of his lands in such a manner that his wife
should have her dowry for life, and then went before the King,
saying to his face, “You have villainously dishonored me and
thrown me in the dung,” and afterward left the country, to the
sorrow and wonder of the nobility, and the “King was blamed by
all.”
If the ction of chivalry molded outward behavior to some extent,
it did not, any more than other models that man has made for
himself, transform human nature. Joinville’s account of the
crusaders at Damietta in 1249 shows the knights under St. Louis
plunged in brutality, blasphemy, and debauchery. Teutonic knights
in their annual forays against the unconverted natives of Lithuania
conducted manhunts of the peasants for sport. Yet, if the code was
but a veneer over violence, greed, and sensuality, it was
nevertheless an ideal, as Christianity was an ideal, toward which
man’s reach, as usual, exceeded his grasp.

Chapter 4

E
War
dward III’s rst campaign in France, halted by the truce of
1342, had been inconclusive and without strategic result
except for the naval battle fought o Sluys, the port of
Bruges, in 1340. Here where the mouth of the Scheldt widens
among protecting isles to form a great natural harbor, the French
had assembled 200 ships from as far away as Genoa and the Levant
for a projected invasion of England. The outcome of the battle was
an English victory that destroyed the French eet and for the time
being gave England command of the Channel. It was won by virtue
of a military innovation that was to become the nemesis of France.
This was the longbow, derived from the Welsh and developed
under Edward I for use against the Scots in the highlands. With a
range reaching 300 yards and a rapidity, in skilled hands, of ten to
twelve arrows a minute in comparison to the crossbow’s two, the
longbow represented a revolutionary delivery of military force. Its
arrow was three feet long, about half the length of the formidable
six-foot bow, and at a range of 200 yards it was not supposed to
miss its target. While at extreme range its penetrating power was
less than that of the crossbow, the longbow’s fearful hail shattered
and demoralized the enemy. Preparing for the challenge to France,
Edward had to make up for the disparity in numbers by some
superiority in weaponry or tactics. In 1337 he had prohibited on
pain of death all sport except archery and canceled the debts of all
workmen who manufactured the bows of yew and their arrows.
Another new weapon, the gun, entered history at this time, but
meekly and tentatively and much less eectively than the longbow.
Invented about 1325, the rst ribaud or pot de fer, as the French
called it, was a small iron cannon shaped like a bottle which red
an iron bolt with a triangular head. When a French raiding force at

the opening of the war sacked and burned Southampton in 1338, it
brought along one ribaud furnished with three pounds of gunpowder
and 48 bolts. In the next year the French manufactured more in the
form of several tubes bound to a wheeled platform, with their
touchholes aligned so that all could be red at once. But they
proved too small to re a projectile with enough force to do serious
damage. The English reportedly used some small cannon at Crécy
without noticeable eect and denitely had them at the siege of
Calais, where they proved powerless against the city’s stone walls.
Later, when cast in brass or copper and enlarged in size, they were
useful against bridges and city or castle gates or in defense of these,
but stone walls withstood them for another hundred years.
Diculties in re-loading, ramming the powder, inserting the
projectile, and containing the gas until it built up enough explosive
force, frustrated eective ring throughout the 14th century.
In the sea ght at Sluys, with Edward in personal command, the
longbowmen dominated the English armament, with one ship of
men-at-arms placed between every two ships of archers, plus extra
ships of archers for reinforcements if need arose. Not naval power
but the strength of soldiers and archers on board ship determined
sea battle in this era. They operated from high-decked cogs of 100
to 300 tons tted with ghting platforms or “castles” for the
archers. The battle was “erce and terrible,” reports Froissart, “for
battles on sea are more dangerous and ercer than battles by land,
for on the sea there is no recoiling or eeing.” Under the archers’
attack the French were driven from their decks and, pursued by ill-
luck and error, were engulfed in defeat.
No one dared tell the outcome of the battle to Philip VI until his
jester was thrust forward and said, “Oh, the cowardly English, the
cowardly English!” arid on being asked why, replied, “They did not
jump overboard like our brave Frenchmen.” The King evidently got
the point. The sh drank so much French blood, it was said
afterward, that if God had given them the power of speech they
would have spoken in French.
The English victory led nowhere at the moment because Edward
could not deliver sucient force on land. His various allies from the

Low Countries, acquired at great expense in subsidies, were slipping
away, having no basic interest in his goal. Even his father-in-law,
Count William of Hainault, returned to a more natural attachment
to France. With his own forces inadequate and his nances
bankrupt, Edward was forced to accept the Pope’s oer to arrange a
truce. He withdrew, but only pour mieux sauter.
What was he really ghting for? What was the real cause of a war
that was to stretch beyond imagining halfway into the next century?
As in most wars, the cause was a mixture of the political, economic,
and psychological. Edward wanted to obtain the ultimate
sovereignty of Guienne and Gascony, that lower western corner of
France remaining from the Duchy of Aquitaine which the marriage
of Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought to his ancestor Henry II ve
generations before. The King of France still retained superior
sovereignty under the formula of superioritas et resortum, which gave
the inhabitants the right of appeal to the ultimate sovereign. Since
his decisions were more than likely to go in their favor against their
English overlord, and since the citizens, knowing this, exercised the
right frequently, the situation was an endless source of conict. To
the English superioritas et resortum was politically and
psychologically intolerable.
The situation was the more galling because of Guienne’s
importance to the English economy. With its fertile valleys, long
coast, and network of navigable rivers all leading to the main port
of Bordeaux, it was the greatest wine-exporting region in the world.
England imported the wine and other products and sent back wool
and cloth, taking on every transaction a handsome revenue from
export taxes at Bordeaux and import taxes at English ports. Between
Bordeaux and Flanders the same ourishing commerce was
exchanged, arousing the envy of central France. To the French
monarchy the English foothold within the realm was unacceptable.
Every French king for 200 years had tried by war, conscation, or
treaty to regain Aquitaine. The quarrel was old and deep and bound
for war as the sparks y upward.

Edward III was fteen years old when he ascended the throne in
1327, 25 when he embarked on war with France, and 34 at the time
of the second attempt in 1346. Well built and vigorous with long-
owing golden hair, mustache, and beard, he was at the height of
his energies, expansive and kingly, vain, gracious, willful, and no
stranger to the worst in man. Having grown up under the vicious
strife surrounding the murder of his father’s favorites, the deposition
and murder of his father, and the overthrow and hanging of his
mother’s lover, Mortimer, who had seized power, he seemed, as far
as history knows, unscarred by the experience. He understood
practical politics without possessing any larger sense of rulership.
He had no great qualities apart from or ahead of his time, but shone
in those qualities his time admired in a king: he loved pleasure,
battle, glory, hunts and tournaments, and extravagant display. One
analysis of his character contains the phrases “boyish charm” and “a
certain youthful petulance,” suggesting that the King of England too
showed signs of the characteristic medieval juvenility.
When Edward launched his claim to be the rightful King of
France, it is uncertain how seriously he took it, but as a device it
was of incomparable value in giving him the appearance of a
righteous cause. While desirable in any epoch, a “just war” in the
14th century was virtually a legal necessity as the basis for
requisitioning feudal aids in men and money. It was equally
essential for securing God on one’s side, for war was considered
fundamentally an appeal to the arbitrament of God. A “just war”
had to be one of public policy declared by the sovereign, and it had
to be in a “just” cause—that is, directed against some “injustice” in
the form of crime or fault on the part of the enemy. As formulated
by the inescapable Thomas Aquinas, it required a third criterion:
right intention on the part of the participants, but how this could be
tested, the great expounder did not say. Even more convenient than
the help of God was the “right of spoil”—in practice, pillage—that
accompanied a just war. It rested on the theory that the enemy,
being “unjust,” had no right to property, and that booty was the due
reward for risk of life in a just cause.

The claim to the French crown gave an excuse of legality to any
vassal of France whom Edward could recruit as an ally. If he, not
Philip, were the rightful King of France, a vassal could transfer his
homage on the ground that it had simply been misplaced. Allegiance
in the 14th century was still given to a person, not a nation, and the
great territorial lords of duchies and counties felt themselves free to
make alliances as if almost autonomous. The Harcourts of
Normandy and the Duke and other lords of Brittany, for various
reasons, did just that. Edward’s claim through his mother gave him
the one thing that made his venture feasible—support within France
and a friendly beachhead. He never had to ght his way in. In either
Normandy or Brittany this situation was to last forty years, and at
Calais, captured after the Battle of Crécy, it was to outlast the
Middle Ages.
In Brittany the war centered upon the relentless feud between two
rival claimants to the dukedom and two parties of the population,
one supported by France and the other by England. As a result,
France was perpetually endangered by the access given to the
enemy. The Breton seacoast was open to English ships, English
garrisons were on Breton soil, Breton nobles were openly allied to
Edward. Brittany was France’s Scotland, choleric, Celtic, stony, bred
to opposition and resistance, and ready to use the English in its
struggles against its overlord as the Scots used the French in theirs.
Along its rockbound coast, in Michelet’s words, “two enemies, earth
and sea, man and nature, meet in eternal conict.” Storms throw up
monstrous waves, fty, sixty, eighty feet, whose foam ies as high
as the church steeple. “Nature is atrocious here; so is man; they
seem to understand each other.”
The contestants for the dukedom were two relentless extremists, a
man and a woman. In 1341 the last Duke had died, leaving a half-
brother, Jean Comte de Montfort, and a niece, Jeanne de
Penthièvre, as rival heirs. Montfort was the candidate and ally of
England while Jeanne’s claim was assumed by her husband, Charles
de Blois, a nephew of Philip VI, who became the French candidate
for the dukedom.

Given to the study of books as a child, Charles was an ascetic of
exaggerated piety who sought spirituality by mortifying the esh.
Like Thomas à Becket, he wore unwashed clothes crawling with lice;
he put pebbles in his shoes, slept on straw on the oor next to his
wife’s bed, and after his death was found to have worn a coarse
shirt of horsehair under his armor, and cords wound so tightly
around his body that the knots dug into his esh. By these practices
a seeker of holiness expressed contempt for the world, self-
abasement, and humility, although he often found himself guilty of
a perverse pride in his excesses. Charles confessed every night so
that he might not go to sleep in a state of sin. He fathered a bastard
son called Jehan de Blois, but sins of the esh did not have to be
eschewed, only repented. He treated the humble with deference, it
was said, met the complaints of the poor with goodness and justice,
and refrained from too heavy taxes. Such was his reputation for
saintliness that when he undertook to walk barefoot in the snow to a
Breton shrine, the people covered his path with straw and blankets,
but he took another way at a cost of bleeding and frozen feet, so
that for weeks afterward he was unable to walk.
His piety detracted not at all from his ferocious pursuit of the
dukedom. He stated his claim below the walls of Nantes by having
his siege engines hurl into the city the heads of thirty captured
partisans of Montfort. His successful siege of Quimper was followed
by a ruthless massacre of 2,000 civilian inhabitants of all ages and
both sexes. According to then current laws of war, the besieged
could make terms if they surrendered, but not if they forced a siege
to its bitter end, so presumably Charles felt no compunctions. On
this occasion, after he had chosen the place of assault, he was
warned of rising ood waters, but refused to alter his decision,
saying, “Does not God have empire over the waters?” When his men
succeeded in taking the city before being trapped by the ood, the
people took it for a miracle owed to Charles’s prayers.
When Charles captured Jean de Montfort and sent him to Paris to
be held prisoner by Philip VI, Montfort’s cause was taken up “with
the courage of a man and the heart of a lion” by his remarkable
wife. Riding from town to town, she rallied the allegiance of

dispirited partisans to her three-year-old son, saying, “Ha, seigneurs,
never mourn for my lord whom you have lost. He is but one man,”
and promising that she had riches enough to maintain the cause.
She provisioned and fortied garrisons, organized resistance, “paid
largely and gave freely,” presided over councils, conducted
diplomacy, and expressed herself in eloquent and graceful letters.
When Charles de Blois besieged Hennebont, she led a heroic defense
in full armor astride a war-horse in the streets, exhorting the
soldiers under a hail of arrows and ordering women to cut short
their skirts and carry stones and pots of boiling pitch to the walls to
cast down upon the enemy. During a lull she led a party of knights
out a secret gate, and galloped by a roundabout way to take the
enemy camp in the rear, destroyed half their force, and defeated the
siege. She devised feints and stratagems, wielded her sword in sea
ghts, and when her husband escaped from the Louvre in disguise
only to die after reaching Brittany, she implacably continued the
ght for her son.
When in 1346, Charles de Blois was nally captured by the
English party and taken to prison in England, his cause was pursued
by his no less implacable wife, the crippled Jeanne de Penthièvre.
The pitiless war went on. Its two chief protagonists met fates
expressive of their time, insanity and sainthood. The blows and
intrigues, privations and broken hopes of her life proved too much
for the valiant Countess of Montfort, who went mad and was
conned in England while Edward made himself guardian of her
son. Shut up and forgotten in the castle of Tickhill, she was to live
on for thirty years.
Charles de Blois, after nine years as a prisoner, was to win his
liberty for a ransom variously reported as 350,000, 400,000, or
700,000 écus. Although he was ready at last to come to terms, his
wife refused to let him renounce her claim, so he renewed the
struggle and was eventually killed in battle. Afterward he was
canonized, but the process was nullied by Pope Gregory XI at the
request of the younger Jean de Montfort, who feared that as
conqueror of a saint he would be regarded by the Bretons as a
usurper.

While famous exploits and great reputations were made in
Brittany, a dierent kind of struggle was fought for Flanders.
Trade and geography made Flanders a crucial stake in the Anglo-
French rivalry. Its towns were the leading commercial centers of
14th century Europe, where Italian merchant bankers and
moneylenders made their northern headquarters, a sure sign of
lucrative business. Wealth generated by the weaving industry
enriched the magnates of the bourgeoisie, who enjoyed a luxury
that had astonished Queen Jeanne, wife of Philip the Fair, when she
visited Bruges. “I thought I would be the only queen here,” she said,
“but I nd six hundred others.”
Though a ef of France, Flanders was tied to England by wool as
Gascony was by wine. “All the nations of the world,” proudly wrote
Matthew of Westminster, “are kept warm by the wool of England
made into cloth by the men of Flanders.” Unexcelled in Europe for
its quality and colors, including heavy cloth for common use, the
cloth of Flanders was sold as far away as the Orient and had
achieved an economic success that made Flanders vulnerable to the
disadvantages of a one-industry economy. In that situation lay the
source of all the turbulence and uprisings of the previous hundred
years, and also the lever that both France and England used in their
contest for control of the region.
The Count of Flanders, Louis de Nevers, and the Flemish nobility
were pro-French, while the merchants and working class and all
who depended on the cloth industry were oriented toward England
in self-interest if not sentiment. The feudal and natural tie with
France predominated. Flemish cloth and French wine were
exchanged in trade, the Count’s court was patterned on that of
France, the nobility intermarried, French prelates held high oces
in Flanders, use of the French language was spreading, Flemish
students went to schools and colleges in Laon, Reims, and Paris.
In Flanders at the beginning of the century, the despised
commoners had inicted upon French knighthood an unforgettable
defeat. In 1302 the array of French chivalry in splendid armor rode
north in support of Flemish urban magnates to crush a revolt of the

workers of Bruges. In the clash at Courtrai, French foot soldiers and
crossbowmen were about to overpower the Flemish workers—too
soon. The knights, frantic for the charge and fearing to lose the
honor of victory, ordered their own infantry to fall back, causing
them to break ranks in confusion. Shouting their war cries and
riding down their own men in wild disorder, the knights charged,
ignoring the canals beneath their feet. Horses scrambled and fell,
knights plunged into the water, a second wave piled upon the rst.
The Flemish infantry, armed with pikes, speared them like sh, and
holding rm against all assault beat back the knights in a bloody
massacre. Seven hundred gold spurs were stripped from knightly
corpses after the battle and hung up in triumphant memorial in the
church. The loss of so much French nobility caused royal
commissioners afterward to scour the provinces for bourgeois and
rich peasants prepared to pay for ennoblement.
The knighthood of France was not daunted by Courtrai nor was its
contempt for the commoner-in-arms in any way altered. The battle
was considered an accident of circumstance and terrain unlikely to
be repeated. In that sense the conclusion was right. In another revolt
and another clash 25 years later, the knights inicted a terrible
revenge at the battle of Cassel, where they butchered Flemish
workers and peasants by the thousands. Yet the lost spurs of
Courtrai were a valid omen of the rise of the common soldier armed
with pike and a motive, and an omen, too, for the knights, which
they ignored.
After the Count of Flanders had been re-established in power by
French arms, Philip VI exerted pressure to tighten relations and
isolate Flanders from England. Against this eort the industrial
towns, led by Ghent, rose in revolt under Jacob van Artevelde, one
of the most dynamic bourgeois gures of the 14th century. An
ambitious merchant of the class that was pressing to take over
political power from the nobility, he had noble pretensions of his
own. His two sons called themselves messire and chevalier, and the
oldest son and a daughter were married into the nobility. Gaining
control of the insurrection, Artevelde defeated the Count’s forces

and forced him to ee to France in 1339, leaving the country under
Artevelde’s control.
Meanwhile Edward, as the supplier of wool for Flemish industry,
was exerting pressure for an alliance that would give him a base
from which to attack France. The Flemish cloth manufacturers
favored the English alliance and Artevelde attached his fortunes to
it. The obstacle of French sovereignty over Flanders was overcome
when Edward assumed the title of King of France. In that capacity
he signed a treaty with Artevelde in 1340 after the victory of Sluys,
but the device was hollow and lasted only long enough to give
Edward a springboard before Artevelde’s ambition brought him
down in ruin.
Artevelde was a man of brutal action who once, when he and a
Flemish knight disagreed, smote him to the ground with a blow of
his st under the eyes of the King of England. Besides using Flemish
funds to nance Edward’s war, he violated Flemish sentiments of
homage. He proposed that the King’s eldest son, Edward, Prince of
Wales, later known as the Black Prince, should supplant the Count
of Flanders’ eldest son, Louis de Male, as heir and future ruler of
Flanders. This was too much for the good Flemish towns. To
disinherit their natural lord in favor of the English prince, they
stoutly told Artevelde, was “a thing they would surely never agree
unto.” Moreover the Pope, under King Philip’s pressure, had already
excommunicated them for deserting their sovereign, causing much
uneasiness and damage to business. Resentment rose against
Artevelde, combined with suspicion that he had embezzled funds for
his own use.

“Then every man began to murmur against Jacques” (Jacob) and
when he rode through Ghent, “trusting so much in his greatness that
he thought soon to reduce them to his pleasure,” angry crowds
followed him to his house, demanding an accounting for all the
revenues of Flanders. Then he began to fear and on entering his
house, closed fast the gates, doors, and windows against the mob
shouting in the street. Coming to the window “in great humilitie,”
Artevelde defended his nine years’ governorship and promised a full
account next day if the crowd would disperse. “Then they all cryed

with one voyse, Come down to us and preche not so hyghe, and
gyve us an account of the great treasure of Flaunders!” Now in
terror, Artevelde shut the window and attempted to escape out the
back door to an adjoining church, but the mob of 400 men broke
down the doors, seized and slew him on the spot. Thus in July 1345
Fortune’s Wheel brought down the great master of Flanders.
Afterward representatives of the Flemish towns hurried to
England to appease King Edward, who was in a great wrath at the
event. Assuring him of the alliance, they suggested a way in which
his line could still inherit Flanders without dispossessing the rightful
lord. Let Edward’s eldest daughter, Isabella, then aged thirteen,
marry the Count of Flanders’ fourteen-year-old son Louis, who was
in the communes’ custody, “so that ever after the county of
Flaunders shall be in the issue of your chylde.” Edward was much
taken with the scheme, although the prospective bridegroom, out of
loyalty to France, was not. When Edward tried to force the betrothal
on him two years later, the Count’s escape, leaving behind an
unwed princess, was to impinge indirectly but decisively on the life
of Enguerrand de Coucy.
To contemporaries the power of the King of England seemed puny
compared with that of the King of France; Villani referred to him as
“il piccolo re d’Inghilterra” (the little King of England). It is doubtful
if he actually intended to conquer France. Medieval wars between
Europeans were not aimed at strategic conquest but rather at seizure
of dynastic rule at the top by inicting enough damage to bring
about downfall of the opponent. Something like this was probably
Edward’s aim, and owing to his base in Guienne and his footholds in
Flanders and northern France, it would not have seemed
unrealizable.
The rst abortive phase had been so costly as to have been
ruinous if Edward had absorbed the cost; instead, he passed on the
ruin to others. He had nanced the war through loans underwritten
by the great Florentine banking rms of the Bardi and Peruzzi. The
sums, according to Villani, amounted to between 600,000 and

900,000 gold orins owed to the Bardi and two-thirds as much to
the Peruzzi, secured on expected revenue from the wool tax. When
this brought in too little and Edward could not repay, the drain on
the Italian companies bankrupted them. The Peruzzi failed in 1343,
the Bardi suspended a year later, and their crash brought down a
third rm, the Acciaiuioli. Capital vanished, stores and workshops
closed, wages and purchases stopped. When, by the malignant
chance that seemed to hound the 14th century, economic
devastation in Florence and Siena was followed rst by famine in
1347 and then by plague, it could not but seem to the unfortunate
people that the anger of God had been loosed upon them.
To raise an army for a second assault after being bankrupted by
the rst would have been impossible without the consent of the
three estates represented in Parliament. Money was the crux.
Raising money to pay the cost of war was to cause more damage to
14th century society than the physical destruction of war itself. The
governing fact was that medieval organization by this time had
passed to a predominantly money economy. Armed forces were no
longer primarily feudal levies serving under a vassal’s obligation
who went home after forty days; they were recruited bodies who
served for pay. The added expense of a paid army raised the cost of
war beyond the ordinary means of the sovereign. Without losing its
appetite for war, the inchoate state had not yet devised a regular
method to pay for it. When he overspent, the sovereign resorted to
loans from bankers, towns, and businesses which he might not be
able to repay, and to the even more disruptive measures of arbitrary
taxation and devaluation of the coinage.
Above all, war was made to pay for itself through pillage. Booty
and ransom were not just a bonus, but a necessity to take the place
of arrears in pay and to induce enlistment. The taking of prisoners
for ransom became a commercial enterprise. Since kings could
rarely raise sucient funds in advance, and collection of taxes was
slow, troops in the eld were always ahead of their pay. Loot on
campaign took the place of the paymaster. Chivalric war, like
chivalric love, was, as Michelet said of the whole epoch, double et
louche (a provocative phrase which could mean “double and

squinting” or “equivocal” or “shady” in the sense of disreputable).
The aim was one thing and the practice another. Knights pursued
war for glory and practiced it for gain.
In 1344 the three estates in Parliament were informed by Edward
of a breach of the truce by the King of France and asked to “show
their opinion.” The advice of Lords and Commons was “to end the
war either by battle or honorable peace,” and, once attempted, not
to abandon the eort at letters or requests of the Pope or anyone
else, “but to end the same by dint of the Sword.” Clergy and
Commons voted subsidies, and in 1345 Parliament authorized the
King to require all landowners to serve in person or supply a
substitute or a monetary equivalent. A man with £5 of income from
land or rents was to supply an archer, a £10 income supplied a
mounted spearman, £20 supplied two of these, income over £25
supplied a man-at-arms, meaning usually a squire or knight. Towns
and shires were required to raise a given number of archers, and the
system as a whole was to be administered by sheris and county
ocials.
Ships had to be requisitioned to carry men and horses and initial
food for both. They also carried millstones and bake ovens, armorers
and their forges, and extra materials to keep the bowmen supplied
with arrows. Most ships were small, averaging 30 to 50 tons, with
one large mast and a rectangular sail, although some ranged up to
200 tons. A medium-sized ship carried 100 to 200 men and 80 to
100 horses.
To ll out the ranks of “arrayed” or drafted foot soldiers, men
were recruited by promise of loot, by pardons of those under
sentence of outlawry, and by promoting anti-French feeling already
aroused by French raids on Southampton, Portsmouth, and other
south-coast towns. King Edward’s assumption of the title of King of
France was proclaimed to the people along with his messages on the
justice of his cause and the wickedness of France. Under the ever-
present fear of French invasion, warning beacons were planted
along the coast, bodies of armed men and horses stationed at
intervals, stores laid by, and small ships drawn close in to land or
onto the beach—not without economic disruption.

In July 1346 the King was ready for his renewed attempt.
Accompanied by his eldest son, fteen-year-old Edward, Prince of
Wales, he set sail for Normandy with 4,000 men-at-arms and 10,000
archers plus a number of Irish and Welsh foot soldiers. (Another
force, sent earlier on the longer voyage to Bordeaux, had already
engaged French forces along the frontiers of Guienne.) Guided by
Godefrey d’Harcourt, who had been banished from France, the
King’s expeditionary force landed on the Cotentin Peninsula, where
Harcourt promised rich opportunities for loot in the prosperous
unwalled towns of his province. Although Edward “desired nothing
so much as deeds of arms,” according to Froissart, he also, in
another case of medieval squinting, apparently welcomed Harcourt’s
promise that he would meet no resistance because the Duke of
Normandy and his knights were ghting the English in Guienne and
the people of Normandy were not used to war.
So fruitful proved Normandy that the English needed to make no
further provision for their host, and so unwarlike that the
inhabitants ed, leaving their houses “well-stued and granges full
of corn for they wist not how to save and keep it.… Before that time
they had never seen men of war nor they wist not what war or
battle meant.” At prosperous Caen, which was unwalled, the
townspeople and a force of knights sent to the defense under the
Constable, Comte d’Eu, oered a vigorous defense, but the English,
drawing on prepared reinforcements, prevailed. The Constable was
captured and, along with many other prisoners and wagons full of
booty, was sent back to England to be held for a great ransom that
was to have tragic consequences. “Burning, plundering and laying
waste,” the English advanced from town to town, gathering up rich
draperies, jewels, plate, merchandise, livestock, and men and
women as captives.
The sack of Normandy by an army led by the King of England
himself was the prototype of all that was to follow. Organized in
three corps or “battles,” the invaders “overran, spoiled and robbed
without mercy,” nding so much booty that they “rode but small
journeys and every day took their lodgings between noon and three
of the clock.” The soldiers “made no count to the King or his ocers

of what they did get; they kept that to themselves.” While they
moved along one side of the Seine toward Paris, King Philip, who
had been at Rouen without taking action, followed them along the
other side and reentered Paris as Edward reached Poissy, twenty
miles west of the city. Here, while the King of England kept the
Feast of Our Lady in mid-August in robes of scarlet furred in ermine,
his army burned and plundered surrounding villages. The ames at
their gates struck the citizens of Paris with “stupeed amazement,”
wrote Jean de Venette, “and I who have written this saw all these
deeds, for they could be seen from Paris by anyone who would
ascend a turret.”
Philip VI had meanwhile issued the arrière-ban or general
summons to all capable of bearing arms in the war area. Based on
the principle that all subjects owed their lives to “defense of country
and crown,” the general summons was supposed to be used only
when the call to nobles had not or would not suce to repel the
enemy. It was issued, like all public announcements, by “public
cry”—that is, by heralds riding forth to proclaim the order aloud in
market place and village square. Individual letters also went to
towns and abbeys, requisitioning the customary subsidies. Some
towns still paid their service in bodies of foot soldiers, hastily
assembled, untrained, and virtually useless; others paid in money,
which permitted the hiring of more eective mercenaries.
Non-noble military contingents were furnished by towns and
districts according to number of hearths and the relative prosperity
or poverty of the community. In some regions every 100 hearths
were obligated to pay for one soldier for one year. In poorer districts
the obligation might be one soldier for every 200 or 300 hearths.
The number of eectives raised at this rate was not large: in 1337,
for example, Rouen supplied 200 men, Narbonne 150 crossbowmen,
Nîmes 95 men-at-arms. In the light of these gures, the chroniclers’
buxom references to tens of thousands shrivel to a more modest
reality. Each levy from town, district, ef, or area of special status
had to be negotiated separately at a dierent rate, for a dierent
duration, and on the basis of dierent rights and privileges, causing
endless disputes in the process. Lords of duchies and counties and

great baronies like Coucy paid their own men through their own
treasurer, although as the war stretched on they had to be
recompensed by the King.
Knights and squires of noble estate received xed rates of pay like
other men. For banneret (a lord who led other knights under his
banner), bachelor knight, and mounted squire the standard rate in
the 1340s was respectively 20, 10, and 6 to 7 sous a day. A
persistent problem was the need to make sure that a ruler was
getting the count and quality he paid for. To this end a montre or
review was held periodically, generally every month, by ocials
with watchful eye to see that a valet was not counted as a
gentilhomme, that sound horses were not substituted for nags during
the review and then withdrawn, and that pay was honestly
distributed in coin and not in kind. In a loosely structured army,
hierarchy of command was lacking. Apart from the King, who led in
person, the permanent ocials were the Constable, a kind of
administrative chief of armed forces, and two Marshals of
indeterminate function; otherwise, military decisions seem to have
been reached by group council among the leaders.
Because of the necessity of donning armor with all its straps and
buckles, battle was a more or less xed engagement, arranged by
the logic of approaching positions. The invention of plate armor
early in the 14th century now supplemented chain mail, which was
penetrable by the crossbow. While styles of armor varied and
changed from one decade to the next, the basics were a suit of plate
armor consisting of a chest piece, a skirt of linked hoops, and arm
and leg pieces, all worn over a hauberk or shirt of chain mail and a
leather or padded tunic, or a tight-tting surcoat. Over the plate was
worn a sleeveless jerkin embroidered with the coat-of-arms
identifying the wearer. Chain mail covered the neck, elbows, and
other joints; gauntlets of linked plates protected the hands. The
helmet, formerly open over the face, now had the added protection
of a visor hinged by removable pins at the brow or on the side.
Weighing seven to eleven pounds, it was dark and stuy inside,
despite eye slits and ventilation holes. The weight of all the added

protection was somewhat compensated by a smaller shield that
allowed greater freedom of action.
“A terrible worm in an iron cocoon,” as he was called in an
anonymous poem, the knight rode on a saddle rising in a high ridge
above the horse’s backbone with his feet resting in very long
stirrups so that he was virtually standing up and able to deliver
tremendous swinging blows from side to side with any one of his
armory of weapons. He began battle with the lance used for
unhorsing the enemy, while from his belt hung a two-handed sword
at one side and an eighteen-inch dagger on the other. He also had
available, either attached to his saddle or carried by his squire, a
longer sword for thrusting like a lance, a battle-ax tted with a
spike behind the curved blade, and a club-headed mace with
sharpened, ridged edges, a weapon favored by martial bishops and
abbots on the theory that it did not come under the rule forbidding
clerics “to smite with the edge of the sword.” The war-horse
carrying this burden was itself armored by plates protecting nose,
chest, and rump and caparisoned with draperies that got in the way
of its legs. When his horse was felled, the knight, weighed down by
his armor and tangled in weapons, shield, and spurs, was likely to
be captured before he could manage to rise.
Tactics on the continent were simply the cavalry charge of knights
followed by hand-to-hand ghting on foot, sometimes preceded or
supplemented by archers and infantry, both of which the knights
despised. In the Scottish wars, however, the English had found that
foot soldiers equipped with the longbow and trained to keep a
disciplined line could, by aiming at the horses, throw back a charge
of mounted knights. A really useful discovery of this kind will take
precedence over class disdain. Given the constant intercourse
between France and England, the French must have seen the
longbow in use, evidently without giving thought to its implications
for themselves. French chivalry refused to concede a serious role in
war to the non-noble, even though the Normans had once captured
England by virtue of the archer who shot Harold through his eye.
The French too used archers and crossbowmen, usually hired
companies of Genoese who made the crossbow a specialty, but when

their blood was up, they hated to give the crossbow the scope for
action that would take the edge o the clash of knights. Chivalry
maintained that the combat of warriors must be personal and
bodily; missiles that permitted combat at a distance were held in
scorn. The rst archer, according to a 12th century song, was “a
coward who dared not come close to his foe.” Nevertheless, when it
came to ghting commoners as at Cassel in 1328, the French had
given their crossbowmen the tactical scope that accounted for that
victory.
The crossbow, made of wood, steel, and sinew, and pulled by aid
of the archer’s foot in a stirrup and a hook or winding handle
attached to his belt, or by a complicated arrangement of winches
and pulleys, shot a bolt of great penetrating power, but the bow was
slow and cumbersome to wield and heavy to carry. The
crossbowman usually carried about fty bolts with him into action,
and his equipment en route had to be transported by wagon. Owing
to the long wind-up, the crossbow was in fact more useful in static
situations such as clearing ramparts in sieges than in open battle. A
charge of knights willing to take some losses could generally shatter
the crossbowmen’s line. Although its mechanical power when rst
invented had been frightening so that it was banned by the Church
in 1139, the crossbow had continued in use for 200 years without
threatening the knights’ mailed dominion.
Protected by plate armor and the pride of chivalry, the noble felt
himself invulnerable and invincible and became increasingly
contemptuous of the foot soldier. He believed that commoners,
being excluded from chivalry, could never be relied upon in war. As
grooms, baggage attendants, foragers, and road-builders—the
equivalent of engineer corps—they were necessary, but as soldiers
in leather jerkins armed with pikes and billhooks, they were
considered an encumbrance who in a sharp ght would “melt away
like snow in sunshine.” This was not simple snobbism but a
reection of experience in the absence of training. The Middle Ages
had no equivalent of the Roman legion. Towns maintained trained
bands of municipal police, but they tended to ll up their
contingents for national defense with ri-ra good for nothing else.

Abbeys had better use for their peasants than to employ their time
in military drill. In any epoch the dierence between a rabble and
an army is training, which was not bestowed on foot soldiers called
up by the arrière-ban. Despised as ineective, they were ineective
because they were despised.
On August 26, 1346, the English and French armies met at Crécy
in Picardy 30 miles inland from the coast. Like the clash in another
August in 1914, the battle opened an era of augmenting violence
and disintegrating control. It had not been planned by the victors.
Informed of the great host that was gathering around the French
King in answer to his summons, Edward showed no desire for a
confrontation, or at least not without rst securing his retreat.
Turning away from Paris, he marched northwestward toward the
Channel coast, presumably making for Flanders, where he could be
sure of ships. If that was his objective, it was not likely to make him
King of France.
The French army by forced marches caught up with the English
before they could reach the sea, but not before Edward, realizing he
would have to ght, took up a good defensive position on a broad
hill above the village of Crécy. So condent were the French nobles
before the battle that they talked of whom they would take prisoner
among their opponents, whose repute and combat records they
knew from tournaments. Only King Philip was irresolute. “Mournful
and anxious,” he seemed to fear some further treason after the
defections of Brittany and Harcourt, or some other hidden peril.
Camping too far from the enemy on the night before combat, his
troops did not reach the battleeld until four P.M., with the sun in
their faces and at the enemy’s back. The crossbowmen were tired
and complaining after the long march, and their bowstrings were
wet from a sudden storm, whereas the English archers had protected
their bowstrings by rolling them up under their helmets. What
followed on the French side was a chaos of mindless audacity, bad
luck, mistakes, indiscipline, and the knights’ chronic disease of

bravado, intent on proving valor devoid of tactical sense or
organized plan.
Seized by last-minute advice to postpone action until the next
day, Philip issued orders for the vanguard to turn back and the rear
guard to halt, but he was not obeyed. Without giving the
crossbowmen a chance to soften the English line, the forward
knights plunged uphill against the enemy. Out of range of their
targets and pierced by English arrows, the Genoese crossbowmen
fell back, throwing down their bows. The King, who on sighting the
English changed color “because he hated them,” lost control of the
situation. Seeing the Genoese ee, either he or his brother, the
Count d’Alençon, shouted, “Slay these rascals who get in our way!”
while his knights “in haste and evil order” slashed at the archers in
their eort to cut a way through. Out of this terrible tangle in their
own ranks, the French launched attack after attack upon the enemy
but the disciplined line of England’s longbowmen, stiened by the
long practice their weapon required, held rm and sowed confusion
and death by their missiles. Then English knights advanced on foot,
preceded by archers and supported by pikemen and murderous
Welsh with long knives who went among the fallen and slew them
on the ground. The Prince of Wales fought at the head of one battle
group while King Edward retained command from a windmill on the
hilltop. Through the failing light and on through darkness until
midnight the melee continued until King Philip, wounded, was led
away by the Count of Hainault, who said to him, “Sire, lose not
yourself willfully” and, taking his horse’s bridle, pulled him from
the eld. With no more than ve companions, the King rode
through the night to a castle whose seneschal, summoned to open
his gate, demanded the name of the summoner. “Open your gate
quickly,” said the King, “for this is the fortune of France.”
Dead upon the eld lay some 4,000 of the French army, perhaps
including Enguerrand de Coucy VI. Among the fallen were the
greatest names of French and allied chivalry: the Count d’Alençon,
brother of the King, Count Louis de Nevers of Flanders, the Counts
of St. Pol and Sancerre, the Duke of Lorraine, the King of Majorca,
and, most renowned of all, King John the Blind of Bohemia, whose

crest of three ostrich feathers with the motto “Ich dien” was taken by
the Prince of Wales and attached to his title thereafter. Charles of
Bohemia, the blind King’s son and future Emperor, less rash than his
father, saw what was coming and escaped.
It was no lack of prowess that defeated the French and allied
knights. They fought as valiantly as the English, for knights were
much the same in all countries. England’s advantage lay in
combining the use of those excluded from chivalry—the Welsh
knifemen, the pikemen, and, above all, the trained yeomen who
pulled the longbow—with the action of the armored knight. So long
as one side in the contest made use of this advantage while the
other side did not, the fortunes of war were to remain unbalanced.
Pursuit for the strategic purpose of destroying the enemy’s armed
forces did not belong in the medieval lexicon of war. Evidently
somewhat stunned by his own victory, Edward made no eort to
pursue. Absorbed in the riches of conquest, the English spent the
day after the battle in counting and identifying the dead, giving
honorable burial to the noblest, and reckoning the ransoms of
prisoners. Afterward, despite his claim to be King of France, Edward
appeared to lose interest in Philip, who had taken refuge in Amiens.
Keeping to the coast, the English marched north to assault Calais,
the port opposite Dover where the Channel is narrowest. Here,
blocked by a tenacious defense, they bogged down in a siege that
was to last a year.
The defeat of French chivalry and of the supposedly most
powerful sovereign in Europe started a train of reactions that were
to grow more serious with time. Although it did not bring down the
French monarchy nor bring it to terms, it did cause a crisis of
condence in the royal government, and a general resentment when
the King once more had to resort to extraordinary taxation. From
this date, too, began an erosion of belief in the nobles’ performance
of their function.
Philip had neither the instinct for rule possessed by Philip the Fair
and St. Louis, nor councillors capable of reforming the military and
nancial customs to meet the new dangers that had come upon
them. The provincial estates whose consent was required for new

taxes were reluctant, like most representative bodies, to recognize
crisis until it was underfoot. Given an inadequate and obsolete
system, the King had to devise substitutes like the sales tax—called
maltôte because it was so hated—or the equally unpopular salt tax;
or else he fell back on devaluing the coinage. In disruption of prices,
rents, debts, and credit, the eect of this subterfuge for taxation was
regularly disastrous. “And in the year 1343 Philip of Valois made 15
deniers worth three,” wrote one chronicler in sucient comment.
Each time they were summoned to vote aids, the Estates voiced
their loud discontent with scal abuses. Each time they made their
grudging subsidies contingent on stated reforms, in the belief that
better management by more honest men would enable the King
once again to live of his own.
After Crécy and the loss of Calais, a new Estates General was
summoned in 1347 to meet the King’s desperate need of money for
defense. Armed forces and a eet had to be reconstructed against
the danger of renewed invasion. Sharpened by the shame of steady
defeats, the Estates’ displeasure with the royal government was
outspoken. “You should know,” they told the King, “how and by
what counsel you have conducted your wars and how you, by bad
counsel, have lost all and gained nothing.” If he had had good
counsel, they said, no prince in the world “should have been able to
do ill to you and your subjects.” They reminded him how he had
gone to Crécy and Calais “in great company, at great cost and great
expense [14th century speakers and writers had an anity for
double statements] and how you were treated shamefully and sent
back scurvily and made to grant all manner of truces even while the
enemy were in your kingdom.… And by such counsel have you been
dishonored.” After this scolding, the Estates, acknowledging the
need for defenses, promised subsidies, but on rather indenite
terms.
While besieging Calais, Edward still hoped to cement an alliance
with Flanders by his daughter’s marriage to the young Count Louis
de Male. The death at Crécy of the boy’s father, Count Louis de

Nevers, removed the main obstacle. But fteen-year-old Louis, “who
had been ever nourished among the noble men of France,” would
not agree and “ever he said he would not wed her whose father had
slain his, though he might have half the whole realm of England.”
When the Flemings saw that their lord was “too much French and
evil counseled,” they put him in “courteous prison” until he should
agree to accept their counsel, which greatly annoyed him, so that
after several months in prison he gave the required promise.
Released, he was allowed to go hawking by the river, but kept under
such close surveillance lest he should steal away “that he could not
piss without their knowledge.” Under this treatment he nally
agreed to wed.
Early in March 1347 the King and Queen of England with their
daughter Isabelle came up from Calais to Flanders. The betrothal
took place in great ceremony, the marriage contract was drawn, the
wedding day xed for the rst week in April, and lavish gifts were
prepared by the royal parents. Louis continued to go hawking daily
by the river, making pretense that the marriage pleased him greatly,
so that the Flemings relaxed their watch. But they misjudged their
lord’s outward countenance, “for his inward courage was all
French.”
In the same week that the marriage was to take place, he rode
forth as usual with his falconer. Casting his hawk after a heron with
the call “Hoie! Hoie!” he followed the ight until at some distance
o he “dashed his spurs to his horse and galloped forth,” not
stopping until he was over the border in France, where he joined
King Philip and told him how with “great subtlety” he had escaped
the English marriage. The King was overjoyed and speedily arranged
Louis’ marriage with Margaret of Brabant, daughter of the Duke of
Brabant, Flanders’ neighbor on the east, who was closely allied to
France. The insult to the English crown was sharp, and doubtless
sharper to the fteen-year-old bride. Her feelings could not have
been soothed by a song written in her name and, according to Jean
de Venette, sung everywhere in France with the refrain, “J’ay failli à
celui à qui je estoie donnée par amour” (I have lost him whose love I

was given to be). Four years later she revenged herself on a dierent
bridegroom by jilting him in her turn almost at the church door.
Either because these aborted betrothals gave her a taste for
independence, or because she had a character notoriously willful,
Isabelle of England was still unmarried when she met Enguerrand de
Coucy VII thirteen years later.
The capture of Calais a few months after the Flemish marital
asco was the single great result of the campaign. Philip had
assembled a relief force and started toward the city, but, hampered
by lack of money and the losses after Crécy, turned away without
ghting. Waiting for the relief that never came and cut o from
food, the citizens of Calais held out until, reduced to eating rats and
mice and even excrement, they were starved into surrender.
Recently wounded, their captain, Jean de Vienne, bare-headed and
holding his sword reversed in token of submission, rode through the
gate to hand over the keys of the city to the English. Walking behind
him barefoot in their shirts were the six richest burghers with
halters around their necks to signify the victor’s right to hang them
at will. In that somber scene, watched by the hollow-eyed, desolate
survivors, a French cause was born: to retrieve Calais.
Exasperated by the prolonged resistance which had dragged him,
against the medieval habit, through a winter’s siege, Edward was in
a furious mood and would have hung the six burghers but for Queen
Philippa’s moving plea for mercy. The drawn-out eort from August
1346 to August 1347 had soured his troops and exhausted his
resources. Provisions, horses, arms, and reinforcements had to be
brought from England, where the requisitioning of grain and cattle
caused hardship, and the necessary mobilizing of ships wrecked
commerce, reducing revenues from the wool-export tax. It has been
estimated that some 32,000 combatants, plus the crews of ships and
all the service troops needed for the siege, making a total of 60,000
to 80,000 men, were employed in the course of the Crécy-Calais
campaign. The drain having reached its limits, Edward could not
advance from his victory. The new foothold in France led nowhere
but to acceptance of a truce running until April 1351.

If belligerents could make sober judgments during the course of a
war, which they rarely can, the rst ten years of the Anglo-French
contest would have shown the English how inconclusive were their
triumphs: to win a smashing naval victory, a smashing eld victory,
and a permanent foothold on the coast was still far from conquering
France or its crown. But the taste of plunder, the gorgeous stus and
rich ransoms owing to England, and the glory and renown of Crécy
cried by the heralds in public places had excited English blood. On
their side, the French would now never stop short of the goal that
the poet Eustache Deschamps was to make his refrain forty years
later: “No peace until they give back Calais.” Crécy and Calais
ensured that the war would go on—but not yet, for Europe in 1347
stood on the edge of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history.

Chapter 5

I
“This Is the End of the World”: The Black Death
n October 1347, two months after the fall of Calais, Genoese
trading ships put into the harbor of Messina in Sicily with dead
and dying men at the oars. The ships had come from the Black
Sea port of Caa (now Feodosiya) in the Crimea, where the
Genoese maintained a trading post. The diseased sailors showed
strange black swellings about the size of an egg or an apple in the
armpits and groin. The swellings oozed blood and pus and were
followed by spreading boils and black blotches on the skin from
internal bleeding. The sick suered severe pain and died quickly
within ve days of the rst symptoms. As the disease spread, other
symptoms of continuous fever and spitting of blood appeared
instead of the swellings or buboes. These victims coughed and
sweated heavily and died even more quickly, within three days or
less, sometimes in 24 hours. In both types everything that issued
from the body—breath, sweat, blood from the buboes and lungs,
bloody urine, and blood-blackened excrement—smelled foul.
Depression and despair accompanied the physical symptoms, and
before the end “death is seen seated on the face.”
The disease was bubonic plague, present in two forms: one that
infected the bloodstream, causing the buboes and internal bleeding,
and was spread by contact; and a second, more virulent pneumonic
type that infected the lungs and was spread by respiratory infection.
The presence of both at once cause the high mortality and speed of
contagion. So lethal was the disease that cases were known of
persons going to bed well and dying before they woke, of doctors
catching the illness at a bedside and dying before the patient. So
rapidly did it spread from one to another that to a French physician,
Simon de Covino, it seemed as if one sick person “could infect the

whole world.” The malignity of the pestilence appeared more
terrible because its victims knew no prevention and no remedy.
The physical suering of the disease and its aspect of evil mystery
were expressed in a strange Welsh lament which saw “death coming
into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts o the young,
a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is
me of the shilling in the armpit! It is seething, terrible … a head
that gives pain and causes a loud cry … a painful angry
knob … Great is its seething like a burning cinder … a grievous
thing of ashy color.” Its eruption is ugly like the “seeds of black
peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal … the early ornaments of
black death, cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed
multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries.…”
Rumors of a terrible plague supposedly arising in China and
spreading through Tartary (Central Asia) to India and Persia,
Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and all of Asia Minor had reached
Europe in 1346. They told of a death toll so devastating that all of
India was said to be depopulated, whole territories covered by dead
bodies, other areas with no one left alive. As added up by Pope
Clement VI at Avignon, the total of reported dead reached
23,840,000. In the absence of a concept of contagion, no serious
alarm was felt in Europe until the trading ships brought their black
burden of pestilence into Messina while other infected ships from
the Levant carried it to Genoa and Venice.
By January 1348 it penetrated France via Marseille, and North
Africa via Tunis. Shipborne along coasts and navigable rivers, it
spread westward from Marseille through the ports of Languedoc to
Spain and northward up the Rhône to Avignon, where it arrived in
March. It reached Narbonne, Montpellier, Carcassonne, and
Toulouse between February and May, and at the same time in Italy
spread to Rome and Florence and their hinterlands. Between June
and August it reached Bordeaux, Lyon, and Paris, spread to
Burgundy and Normandy, and crossed the Channel from Normandy
into southern England. From Italy during the same summer it
crossed the Alps into Switzerland and reached eastward to Hungary.

In a given area the plague accomplished its kill within four to six
months and then faded, except in the larger cities, where, rooting
into the close-quartered population, it abated during the winter,
only to reappear in spring and rage for another six months.
In 1349 it resumed in Paris, spread to Picardy, Flanders, and the
Low Countries, and from England to Scotland and Ireland as well as
to Norway, where a ghost ship with a cargo of wool and a dead
crew drifted oshore until it ran aground near Bergen. From there
the plague passed into Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Iceland, and as
far as Greenland. Leaving a strange pocket of immunity in Bohemia,
and Russia unattacked until 1351, it had passed from most of
Europe by mid-1350. Although the mortality rate was erratic,
ranging from one fth in some places to nine tenths or almost total
elimination in others, the overall estimate of modern demographers
has settled—for the area extending from India to Iceland—around
the same gure expressed in Froissart’s casual words: “a third of the
world died.” His estimate, the common one at the time, was not an
inspired guess but a borrowing of St. John’s gure for mortality
from plague in Revelation, the favorite guide to human aairs of the
Middle Ages.
A third of Europe would have meant about 20 million deaths. No
one knows in truth how many died. Contemporary reports were an
awed impression, not an accurate count. In crowded Avignon, it was
said, 400 died daily; 7,000 houses emptied by death were shut up; a
single graveyard received 11,000 corpses in six weeks; half the city’s
inhabitants reportedly died, including 9 cardinals or one third of the
total, and 70 lesser prelates. Watching the endlessly passing death
carts, chroniclers let normal exaggeration take wings and put the
Avignon death toll at 62,000 and even at 120,000, although the
city’s total population was probably less than 50,000.
When graveyards lled up, bodies at Avignon were thrown into
the Rhône until mass burial pits were dug for dumping the corpses.
In London in such pits corpses piled up in layers until they
overowed. Everywhere reports speak of the sick dying too fast for
the living to bury. Corpses were dragged out of homes and left in
front of doorways. Morning light revealed new piles of bodies. In

Florence the dead were gathered up by the Compagnia della
Misericordia—founded in 1244 to care for the sick—whose
members wore red robes and hoods masking the face except for the
eyes. When their eorts failed, the dead lay putrid in the streets for
days at a time. When no cons were to be had, the bodies were laid
on boards, two or three at once, to be carried to graveyards or
common pits. Families dumped their own relatives into the pits, or
buried them so hastily and thinly “that dogs dragged them forth and
devoured their bodies.”
Amid accumulating death and fear of contagion, people died
without last rites and were buried without prayers, a prospect that
terried the last hours of the stricken. A bishop in England gave
permission to laymen to make confession to each other as was done
by the Apostles, “or if no man is present then even to a woman,”
and if no priest could be found to administer extreme unction, “then
faith must suce.” Clement VI found it necessary to grant
remissions of sin to all who died of the plague because so many
were unattended by priests. “And no bells tolled,” wrote a
chronicler of Siena, “and nobody wept no matter what his loss
because almost everyone expected death.… And people said and
believed, ‘This is the end of the world.’ ”
In Paris, where the plague lasted through 1349, the reported
death rate was 800 a day, in Pisa 500, in Vienna 500 to 600. The
total dead in Paris numbered 50,000 or half the population.
Florence, weakened by the famine of 1347, lost three to four fths
of its citizens, Venice two thirds, Hamburg and Bremen, though
smaller in size, about the same proportion. Cities, as centers of
transportation, were more likely to be aected than villages,
although once a village was infected, its death rate was equally
high. At Givry, a prosperous village in Burgundy of 1,200 to 1,500
people, the parish register records 615 deaths in the space of
fourteen weeks, compared to an average of thirty deaths a year in
the previous decade. In three villages of Cambridgeshire, manorial
records show a death rate of 47 percent, 57 percent, and in one case
70 percent. When the last survivors, too few to carry on, moved
away, a deserted village sank back into the wilderness and

disappeared from the map altogether, leaving only a grass-covered
ghostly outline to show where mortals once had lived.
In enclosed places such as monasteries and prisons, the infection
of one person usually meant that of all, as happened in the
Franciscan convents of Carcassonne and Marseille, where every
inmate without exception died. Of the 140 Dominicans at
Montpellier only seven survived. Petrarch’s brother Gherardo,
member of a Carthusian monastery, buried the prior and 34 fellow
monks one by one, sometimes three a day, until he was left alone
with his dog and ed to look for a place that would take him in.
Watching every comrade die, men in such places could not but
wonder whether the strange peril that lled the air had not been
sent to exterminate the human race. In Kilkenny, Ireland, Brother
John Clyn of the Friars Minor, another monk left alone among dead
men, kept a record of what had happened lest “things which should
be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of
those who come after us.” Sensing “the whole world, as it were,
placed within the grasp of the Evil One,” and waiting for death to
visit him too, he wrote, “I leave parchment to continue this work, if
perchance any man survive and any of the race of Adam escape this
pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun.” Brother
John, as noted by another hand, died of the pestilence, but he foiled
oblivion.
The largest cities of Europe, with populations of about 100,000,
were Paris and Florence, Venice and Genoa. At the next level, with
more than 50,000, were Ghent and Bruges in Flanders, Milan,
Bologna, Rome, Naples, and Palermo, and Cologne. London hovered
below 50,000, the only city in England except York with more than
10,000. At the level of 20,000 to 50,000 were Bordeaux, Toulouse,
Montpellier, Marseille, and Lyon in France, Barcelona, Seville, and
Toledo in Spain, Siena, Pisa, and other secondary cities in Italy, and
the Hanseatic trading cities of the Empire. The plague raged through
them all, killing anywhere from one third to two thirds of their
inhabitants. Italy, with a total population of 10 to 11 million,
probably suered the heaviest toll. Following the Florentine
bankruptcies, the crop failures and workers’ riots of 1346–47, the

revolt of Cola di Rienzi that plunged Rome into anarchy, the plague
came as the peak of successive calamities. As if the world were
indeed in the grasp of the Evil One, its rst appearance on the
European mainland in January 1348 coincided with a fearsome
earthquake that carved a path of wreckage from Naples up to
Venice. Houses collapsed, church towers toppled, villages were
crushed, and the destruction reached as far as Germany and Greece.
Emotional response, dulled by horrors, underwent a kind of atrophy
epitomized by the chronicler who wrote, “And in these days was
burying without sorrowe and wedding without friendschippe.”
In Siena, where more than half the inhabitants died of the plague,
work was abandoned on the great cathedral, planned to be the
largest in the world, and never resumed, owing to loss of workers
and master masons and “the melancholy and grief” of the survivors.
The cathedral’s truncated transept still stands in permanent witness
to the sweep of death’s scythe. Agnolo di Tura, a chronicler of Siena,
recorded the fear of contagion that froze every other instinct.
“Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another,” he
wrote, “for this plague seemed to strike through the breath and
sight. And so they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead
for money or friendship.… And I, Angolo di Tura, called the Fat,
buried my ve children with my own hands, and so did many others
likewise.”
There were many to echo his account of inhumanity and few to
balance it, for the plague was not the kind of calamity that inspired
mutual help. Its loathsomeness and deadliness did not herd people
together in mutual distress, but only prompted their desire to escape
each other. “Magistrates and notaries refused to come and make the
wills of the dying,” reported a Franciscan friar of Piazza in Sicily;
what was worse, “even the priests did not come to hear their
confessions.” A clerk of the Archbishop of Canterbury reported the
same of English priests who “turned away from the care of their
beneces from fear of death.” Cases of parents deserting children
and children their parents were reported across Europe from
Scotland to Russia. The calamity chilled the hearts of men, wrote
Boccaccio in his famous account of the plague in Florence that

serves as introduction to the Decameron. “One man shunned
another … kinsfolk held aloof, brother was forsaken by brother,
oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be
believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own
children to their fate, untended, unvisited as if they had been
strangers.” Exaggeration and literary pessimism were common in
the 14th century, but the Pope’s physician, Guy de Chauliac, was a
sober, careful observer who reported the same phenomenon: “A
father did not visit his son, nor the son his father. Charity was
dead.”
Yet not entirely. In Paris, according to the chronicler Jean de
Venette, the nuns of the Hôtel Dieu or municipal hospital, “having
no fear of death, tended the sick with all sweetness and humility.”
New nuns repeatedly took the places of those who died, until the
majority “many times renewed by death now rest in peace with
Christ as we may piously believe.”
When the plague entered northern France in July 1348, it settled
rst in Normandy and, checked by winter, gave Picardy a deceptive
interim until the next summer. Either in mourning or warning, black
ags were own from church towers of the worst-stricken villages of
Normandy. “And in that time,” wrote a monk of the abbey of
Fourcarment, “the mortality was so great among the people of
Normandy that those of Picardy mocked them.” The same
unneighborly reaction was reported of the Scots, separated by a
winter’s immunity from the English. Delighted to hear of the disease
that was scourging the “southrons,” they gathered forces for an
invasion, “laughing at their enemies.” Before they could move, the
savage mortality fell upon them too, scattering some in death and
the rest in panic to spread the infection as they ed.
In Picardy in the summer of 1349 the pestilence penetrated the
castle of Coucy to kill Enguerrand’s mother, Catherine, and her new
husband. Whether her nine-year-old son escaped by chance or was
perhaps living elsewhere with one of his guardians is unrecorded. In
nearby Amiens, tannery workers, responding quickly to losses in the
labor force, combined to bargain for higher wages. In another place
villagers were seen dancing to drums and trumpets, and on being

asked the reason, answered that, seeing their neighbors die day by
day while their village remained immune, they believed they could
keep the plague from entering “by the jollity that is in us. That is
why we dance.” Further north in Tournai on the border of Flanders,
Gilles li Muisis, Abbot of St. Martin’s, kept one of the epidemic’s
most vivid accounts. The passing bells rang all day and all night, he
recorded, because sextons were anxious to obtain their fees while
they could. Filled with the sound of mourning, the city became
oppressed by fear, so that the authorities forbade the tolling of bells
and the wearing of black and restricted funeral services to two
mourners. The silencing of funeral bells and of criers’
announcements of deaths was ordained by most cities. Siena
imposed a ne on the wearing of mourning clothes by all except
widows.
Flight was the chief recourse of those who could aord it or
arrange it. The rich ed to their country places like Boccaccio’s
young patricians of Florence, who settled in a pastoral palace
“removed on every side from the roads” with “wells of cool water
and vaults of rare wines.” The urban poor died in their burrows,
“and only the stench of their bodies informed neighbors of their
death.” That the poor were more heavily aicted than the rich was
clearly remarked at the time, in the north as in the south. A Scottish
chronicler, John of Fordun, stated atly that the pest “attacked
especially the meaner sort and common people—seldom the
magnates.” Simon de Covino of Montpellier made the same
observation. He ascribed it to the misery and want and hard lives
that made the poor more susceptible, which was half the truth.
Close contact and lack of sanitation was the unrecognized other
half. It was noticed too that the young died in greater proportion
than the old; Simon de Covino compared the disappearance of youth
to the withering of owers in the elds.
In the countryside peasants dropped dead on the roads, in the
elds, in their houses. Survivors in growing helplessness fell into
apathy, leaving ripe wheat uncut and livestock untended. Oxen and
asses, sheep and goats, pigs and chickens ran wild and they too,
according to local reports, succumbed to the pest. English sheep,

bearers of the precious wool, died throughout the country. The
chronicler Henry Knighton, canon of Leicester Abbey, reported
5,000 dead in one eld alone, “their bodies so corrupted by the
plague that neither beast nor bird would touch them,” and
spreading an appalling stench. In the Austrian Alps wolves came
down to prey upon sheep and then, “as if alarmed by some invisible
warning, turned and ed back into the wilderness.” In remote
Dalmatia bolder wolves descended upon a plague-stricken city and
attacked human survivors. For want of herdsmen, cattle strayed
from place to place and died in hedgerows and ditches. Dogs and
cats fell like the rest.
The dearth of labor held a fearful prospect because the 14th
century lived close to the annual harvest both for food and for next
year’s seed. “So few servants and laborers were left,” wrote
Knighton, “that no one knew where to turn for help.” The sense of a
vanishing future created a kind of dementia of despair. A Bavarian
chronicler of Neuberg on the Danube recorded that “Men and
women … wandered around as if mad” and let their cattle stray
“because no one had any inclination to concern themselves about
the future.” Fields went uncultivated, spring seed unsown. Second
growth with nature’s awful energy crept back over cleared land,
dikes crumbled, salt water re-invaded and soured the lowlands.
With so few hands remaining to restore the work of centuries,
people felt, in Walsingham’s words, that “the world could never
again regain its former prosperity.”
Though the death rate was higher among the anonymous poor,
the known and the great died too. King Alfonso XI of Castile was the
only reigning monarch killed by the pest, but his neighbor King
Pedro of Aragon lost his wife, Queen Leonora, his daughter Marie,
and a niece in the space of six months. John Cantacuzene, Emperor
of Byzantium, lost his son. In France the lame Queen Jeanne and her
daughter-in-law Bonne de Luxemburg, wife of the Dauphin, both
died in 1349 in the same phase that took the life of Enguerrand’s
mother. Jeanne, Queen of Navarre, daughter of Louis X, was another
victim. Edward Ill’s second daughter, Joanna, who was on her way
to marry Pedro, the heir of Castile, died in Bordeaux. Women

appear to have been more vulnerable than men, perhaps because,
being more housebound, they were more exposed to eas.
Boccaccio’s mistress Fiammetta, illegitimate daughter of the King of
Naples, died, as did Laura, the beloved—whether real or ctional—
of Petrarch. Reaching out to us in the future, Petrarch cried, “Oh
happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will
look upon our testimony as a fable.”
In Florence Giovanni Villani, the great historian of his time, died
at 68 in the midst of an unnished sentence: “… e dure questo
pistolenza no a … (in the midst of this pestilence there came to an
end …).” Siena’s master painters, the brothers Ambrogio and Pietro
Lorenzetti, whose names never appear after 1348, presumably
perished in the plague, as did Andrea Pisano, architect and sculptor
of Florence. William of Ockham and the English mystic Richard
Rolle of Hampole both disappear from mention after 1349.
Francisco Datini, merchant of Prato, lost both his parents and two
siblings. Curious sweeps of mortality aicted certain bodies of
merchants in London. All eight wardens of the Company of Cutters,
all six wardens of the Hatters, and four wardens of the Goldsmiths
died before July 1350. Sir John Pulteney, master draper and four
times Mayor of London, was a victim, likewise Sir John
Montgomery, Governor of Calais.
Among the clergy and doctors the mortality was naturally high
because of the nature of their professions. Out of 24 physicians in
Venice, 20 were said to have lost their lives in the plague, although,
according to another account, some were believed to have ed or to
have shut themselves up in their houses. At Montpellier, site of the
leading medieval medical school, the physician Simon de Covino
reported that, despite the great number of doctors, “hardly one of
them escaped.” In Avignon, Guy de Chauliac confessed that he
performed his medical visits only because he dared not stay away
for fear of infamy, but “I was in continual fear.” He claimed to have
contracted the disease but to have cured himself by his own
treatment; if so, he was one of the few who recovered.
Clerical mortality varied with rank. Although the one-third toll of
cardinals reects the same proportion as the whole, this was

probably due to their concentration in Avignon. In England, in
strange and almost sinister procession, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, John Stratford, died in August 1348, his appointed
successor died in May 1349, and the next appointee three months
later, all three within a year. Despite such weird vagaries, prelates
in general managed to sustain a higher survival rate than the lesser
clergy. Among bishops the deaths have been estimated at about one
in twenty. The loss of priests, even if many avoided their fearful
duty of attending the dying, was about the same as among the
population as a whole.
Government ocials, whose loss contributed to the general chaos,
found, on the whole, no special shelter. In Siena four of the nine
members of the governing oligarchy died, in France one third of the
royal notaries, in Bristol 15 out of the 52 members of the Town
Council or almost one third. Tax-collecting obviously suered, with
the result that Philip VI was unable to collect more than a fraction
of the subsidy granted him by the Estates in the winter of 1347–48.
Lawlessness and debauchery accompanied the plague as they had
during the great plague of Athens of 430 B.C., when according to
Thucydides, men grew bold in the indulgence of pleasure: “For
seeing how the rich died in a moment and those who had nothing
immediately inherited their property, they reected that life and
riches were alike transitory and they resolved to enjoy themselves
while they could.” Human behavior is timeless. When St. John had
his vision of plague in Revelation, he knew from some experience or
race memory that those who survived “repented not of the work of
their hands.… Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their
sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.”
Ignorance of the cause augmented the sense of horror. Of the real
carriers, rats and eas, the 14th century had no suspicion, perhaps
because they were so familiar. Fleas, though a common household
nuisance, are not once mentioned in contemporary plague writings,
and rats only incidentally, although folklore commonly associated
them with pestilence. The legend of the Pied Piper arose from an

outbreak of 1284. The actual plague bacillus, Pasturella pestis,
remained undiscovered for another 500 years. Living alternately in
the stomach of the ea and the bloodstream of the rat who was the
ea’s host, the bacillus in its bubonic form was transferred to
humans and animals by the bite of either rat or ea. It traveled by
virtue of Rattus rattus, the small medieval black rat that lived on
ships, as well as by the heavier brown or sewer rat. What
precipitated the turn of the bacillus from innocuous to virulent form
is unknown, but the occurrence is now believed to have taken place
not in China but somewhere in central Asia and to have spread
along the caravan routes. Chinese origin was a mistaken notion of
the 14th century based on real but belated reports of huge death
tolls in China from drought, famine, and pestilence which have
since been traced to the 1330s, too soon to be responsible for the
plague that appeared in India in 1346.
The phantom enemy had no name. Called the Black Death only in
later recurrences, it was known during the rst epidemic simply as
the Pestilence or Great Mortality. Reports from the East, swollen by
fearful imaginings, told of strange tempests and “sheets of re”
mingled with huge hailstones that “slew almost all,” or a “vast rain
of re” that burned up men, beasts, stones, trees, villages, and cities.
In another version, “foul blasts of wind” from the res carried the
infection to Europe “and now as some suspect it cometh round the
seacoast.” Accurate observation in this case could not make the
mental jump to ships and rats because no idea of animal- or insect-
borne contagion existed.
The earthquake was blamed for releasing sulfurous and foul fumes
from the earth’s interior, or as evidence of a titanic struggle of
planets and oceans causing waters to rise and vaporize until sh
died in masses and corrupted the air. All these explanations had in
common a factor of poisoned air, of miasmas and thick, stinking
mists traced to every kind of natural or imagined agency from
stagnant lakes to malign conjunction of the planets, from the hand
of the Evil One to the wrath of God. Medical thinking, trapped in
the theory of astral inuences, stressed air as the communicator of

disease, ignoring sanitation or visible carriers. The existence of two
carriers confused the trail, the more so because the ea could live
and travel independently of the rat for as long as a month and, if
infected by the particularly virulent septicemic form of the bacillus,
could infect humans without reinfecting itself from the rat. The
simultaneous presence of the pneumonic form of the disease, which
was indeed communicated through the air, blurred the problem
further.
The mystery of the contagion was “the most terrible of all the
terrors,” as an anonymous Flemish cleric in Avignon wrote to a
correspondent in Bruges. Plagues had been known before, from the
plague of Athens (believed to have been typhus) to the prolonged
epidemic of the 6th century A.D., to the recurrence of sporadic
outbreaks in the 12th and 13th centuries, but they had left no
accumulated store of understanding. That the infection came from
contact with the sick or with their houses, clothes, or corpses was
quickly observed but not comprehended. Gentile da Foligno,
renowned physician of Perugia and doctor of medicine at the
universities of Bologna and Padua, came close to respiratory
infection when he surmised that poisonous material was
“communicated by means of air breathed out and in.” Having no
idea of microscopic carriers, he had to assume that the air was
corrupted by planetary inuences. Planets, however, could not
explain the ongoing contagion. The agonized search for an answer
gave rise to such theories as transference by sight. People fell ill,
wrote Guy de Chauliac, not only by remaining with the sick but
“even by looking at them.” Three hundred years later Joshua
Barnes, the 17th century biographer of Edward III, could write that
the power of infection had entered into beams of light and “darted
death from the eyes.”
Doctors struggling with the evidence could not break away from
the terms of astrology, to which they believed all human physiology
was subject. Medicine was the one aspect of medieval life, perhaps
because of its links with the Arabs, not shaped by Christian doctrine.
Clerics detested astrology, but could not dislodge its inuence. Guy

de Chauliac, physician to three popes in succession, practiced in
obedience to the zodiac. While his Cirurgia was the major treatise on
surgery of its time, while he understood the use of anesthesia made
from the juice of opium, mandrake, or hemlock, he nevertheless
prescribed bleeding and purgatives by the planets and divided
chronic from acute diseases on the basis of one being under the rule
of the sun and the other of the moon.
In October 1348 Philip VI asked the medical faculty of the
University of Paris for a report on the aiction that seemed to
threaten human survival. With careful thesis, antithesis, and proofs,
the doctors ascribed it to a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and
Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius said to have occurred on March
20, 1345. They acknowledged, however, eects “whose cause is
hidden from even the most highly trained intellects.” The verdict of
the masters of Paris became the ocial version. Borrowed, copied
by scribes, carried abroad, translated from Latin into various
vernaculars, it was everywhere accepted, even by the Arab
physicians of Cordova and Granada, as the scientic if not the
popular answer. Because of the terrible interest of the subject, the
translations of the plague tracts stimulated use of national
languages. In that one respect, life came from death.
To the people at large there could be but one explanation—the
wrath of God. Planets might satisfy the learned doctors, but God
was closer to the average man. A scourge so sweeping and
unsparing without any visible cause could only be seen as Divine
punishment upon mankind for its sins. It might even be God’s
terminal disappointment in his creature. Matteo Villani compared
the plague to the Flood in ultimate purpose and believed he was
recording “the extermination of mankind.” Eorts to appease Divine
wrath took many forms, as when the city of Rouen ordered that
everything that could anger God, such as gambling, cursing, and
drinking, must be stopped. More general were the penitent
processions authorized at rst by the Pope, some lasting as long as

three days, some attended by as many as 2,000, which everywhere
accompanied the plague and helped to spread it.
Barefoot in sackcloth, sprinkled with ashes, weeping, praying,
tearing their hair, carrying candles and relics, sometimes with ropes
around their necks or beating themselves with whips, the penitents
wound through the streets, imploring the mercy of the Virgin and
saints at their shrines. In a vivid illustration for the Très Riches
Heures of the Duc de Berry, the Pope is shown in a penitent
procession attended by four cardinals in scarlet from hat to hem. He
raises both arms in supplication to the angel on top of the Castel
Sant’Angelo, while white-robed priests bearing banners and relics in
golden cases turn to look as one of their number, stricken by the
plague, falls to the ground, his face contorted with anxiety. In the
rear, a gray-clad monk falls beside another victim already on the
ground as the townspeople gaze in horror. (Nominally the
illustration represents a 6th century plague in the time of Pope
Gregory the Great, but as medieval artists made no distinction
between past and present, the scene is shown as the artist would
have seen it in the 14th century.) When it became evident that these
processions were sources of infection, Clement VI had to prohibit
them.
In Messina, where the plague rst appeared, the people begged
the Archbishop of neighboring Catania to lend them the relics of St.
Agatha. When the Catanians refused to let the relics go, the
Archbishop dipped them in holy water and took the water himself to
Messina, where he carried it in a procession with prayers and
litanies through the streets. The demonic, which shared the
medieval cosmos with God, appeared as “demons in the shape of
dogs” to terrify the people. “A black dog with a drawn sword in his
paws appeared among them, gnashing his teeth and rushing upon
them and breaking all the silver vessels and lamps and candlesticks
on the altars and casting them hither and thither.… So the people of
Messina, terried by this prodigious vision, were all strangely
overcome by fear.”

The apparent absence of earthly cause gave the plague a
supernatural and sinister quality. Scandinavians believed that a Pest
Maiden emerged from the mouth of the dead in the form of a blue
ame and ew through the air to infect the next house. In Lithuania
the Maiden was said to wave a red scarf through the door or
window to let in the pest. One brave man, according to legend,
deliberately waited at his open window with drawn sword and, at
the uttering of the scarf, chopped o the hand. He died of his
deed, but his village was spared and the scarf long preserved as a
relic in the local church.
Beyond demons and superstition the nal hand was God’s. The
Pope acknowledged it in a Bull of September 1348, speaking of the
“pestilence with which God is aicting the Christian people.” To
the Emperor John Cantacuzene it was manifest that a malady of
such horrors, stenches, and agonies, and especially one bringing the
dismal despair that settled upon its victims before they died, was
not a plague “natural” to mankind but “a chastisement from
Heaven.” To Piers Plowman “these pestilences were for pure sin.”
The general acceptance of this view created an expanded sense of
guilt, for if the plague were punishment there had to be terrible sin
to have occasioned it. What sins were on the 14th century
conscience? Primarily greed, the sin of avarice, followed by usury,
worldliness, adultery, blasphemy, falsehood, luxury, irreligion.
Giovanni Villani, attempting to account for the cascade of calamity
that had fallen upon Florence, concluded that it was retribution for
the sins of avarice and usury that oppressed the poor. Pity and anger
about the condition of the poor, especially victimization of the
peasantry in war, was often expressed by writers of the time and
was certainly on the conscience of the century. Beneath it all was
the daily condition of medieval life, in which hardly an act or
thought, sexual, mercantile, or military, did not contravene the
dictates of the Church. Mere failure to fast or attend mass was sin.
The result was an underground lake of guilt in the soul that the
plague now tapped.
That the mortality was accepted as God’s punishment may explain
in part the vacuum of comment that followed the Black Death. An

investigator has noticed that in the archives of Périgord references
to the war are innumerable, to the plague few. Froissart mentions
the great death but once, Chaucer gives it barely a glance. Divine
anger so great that it contemplated the extermination of man did
not bear close examination.
Eorts to cope with the epidemic availed little, either in treatment
or prevention. Helpless to alleviate the plague, the doctors’ primary
eort was to keep it at bay, chiey by burning aromatic substances
to purify the air. The leader of Christendom, Pope Clement VI, was
preserved in health by this method, though for an unrecognized
reason: Clement’s doctor, Guy de Chauliac, ordered that two huge
res should burn in the papal apartments and required the Pope to
sit between them in the heat of the Avignon summer. This drastic
treatment worked, doubtless because it discouraged the attention of
eas and also because de Chauliac required the Pope to remain
isolated in his chambers. Their lovely murals of gardens, hunting,
and other secular joys, painted at Clement’s command, perhaps gave
him some refreshment. A Pope of prodigal splendor and “sensual
vices,” Clement was also a man of great learning and a patron of
arts and science who now encouraged dissections of the dead “in
order that the origins of this disease might be known.” Many were
performed in Avignon as well as in Florence, where the city
authorities paid for corpses to be delivered to physicians for this
purpose.
Doctors’ remedies in the 14th century ranged from the empiric
and sensible to the magical, with little distinction made between
one and the other. Though medicine was barred by the Church from
investigation of anatomy and physiology and from dissection of
corpses, the classical anatomy of Galen, transferred through Arab
treatises, was kept alive in private anatomy lessons. The need for
knowledge was able sometimes to defy the Church: in 1340
Montpellier authorized an anatomy class every two years which
lasted for several days and consisted of a surgeon dissecting a
cadaver while a doctor of medicine lectured.

Otherwise, the theory of humors, along with astrology, governed
practice. All human temperaments were considered to belong to one
or another of the four humors—sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and
melancholic. In various permutations with the signs of the zodiac,
each of which governed a particular part of the body, the humors
and constellations determined the degrees of bodily heat, moisture,
and proportion of masculinity and femininity of each person.
Notwithstanding all their charts and stars, and medicaments
barely short of witches’ brews, doctors gave great attention to diet,
bodily health, and mental attitude. Nor were they lacking in
practical skills. They could set broken bones, extract teeth, remove
bladder stones, remove cataracts of the eye with a silver needle, and
restore a mutilated face by skin graft from the arm. They understood
epilepsy and apoplexy as spasms of the brain. They used urinalysis
and pulse beat for diagnosis, knew what substances served as
laxatives and diuretics, applied a truss for hernia, a mixture of oil,
vinegar, and sulfur for toothache, and ground peony root with oil of
roses for headache.
For ills beyond their powers they fell back on the supernatural or
on elaborate compounds of metallic, botanic, and animal
substances. The oensive, like the expensive, had extra value.
Ringworm was treated by washing the scalp with a boy’s urine, gout
by a plaster of goat dung mixed with rosemary and honey. Relief of
the patient was their object—cure being left to God—and
psychological suggestion often their means. To prevent pockmarks,
a smallpox patient would be wrapped in red cloth in a bed hung
with red hangings. When surgery was unavailing, recourse was had
to the aid of the Virgin or the relics of saints.
In their purple or red gowns and furred hoods, doctors were
persons of important status. Allowed extra luxury by the sumptuary
laws, they wore belts of silver thread, embroidered gloves, and,
according to Petrarch’s annoyed report, presumptuously donned
golden spurs when they rode to their visits attended by a servant.
Their wives were permitted greater expenditure on clothes than
other women, perhaps in recognition of the large fees doctors could
command. Not all were learned professors. Boccaccio’s Doctor

Simon was a proctologist who had a chamber pot painted over his
door to indicate his specialty.
When it came to the plague, suerers were treated by various
measures designed to draw poison or infection from the body: by
bleeding, purging with laxatives or enemas, lancing or cauterizing
the buboes, or application of hot plasters. None of this was of much
use. Medicines ranged from pills of powdered stag’s horn or myrrh
and saron to potions of potable gold. Compounds of rare spices
and powdered pearls or emeralds were prescribed, possibly on the
theory, not unknown to modern medicine, that a patient’s sense of
therapeutic value is in proportion to the expense.
Doctors advised that oors should be sprinkled, and hands,
mouth, and nostrils washed with vinegar and rosewater. Bland diets,
avoidance of excitement and anger especially at bedtime, mild
exercise, and removal wherever possible from swamps and other
sources of dank air were all recommended. Pomanders made of
exotic compounds were to be carried on going out, probably more
as antidote to the plague’s odors than to its contagion. Conversely,
in the curious belief that latrine attendants were immune, many
people visited the public latrines on the theory that foul odors were
ecacious.
Sewage disposal was not unprovided for in the 14th century,
though far from adequate. Privies, cesspools, drainage pipes, and
public latrines existed, though they did not replace open street
sewers. Castles and wealthy town houses had privies built into bays
jutting from an outside wall with a hole in the bottom allowing the
deposit to fall into a river or into a ditch for subsequent removal.
Town houses away from the riverbank had cesspools in the
backyard at a regulated distance from the neighbor’s. Although
supposedly constructed under town ordinances, they frequently
seeped into wells and other water sources. Except for household
urinals, the contents of privies were prohibited from draining into
street sewers. Public outing of ordinances was more to blame for
unsanitary streets than inadequate technology.
Some abbeys and large castles, including Coucy, had separate
buildings to serve as latrines for the monks or garrison. The donjon

at Coucy had latrines at each of its three levels. Drainage was
channeled into vaulted stone ditches with ventilating holes and
openings for removal, or into underground pits later mistaken by
investigators of a more romantic period for secret passages and
oubliettes. Under the concept of “noble” architecture, the 15th and
later centuries preferred to ignore human elimination. Coucy
probably had better sanitation than Versailles.
During the plague, as street cleaners and carters died, cities grew
befouled, increasing the infection. Residents of a street might rent a
cart in common to remove the waste, but energy and will were
depressed. The breakdown in street-cleaning appears in a letter of
Edward III to the Mayor of London in 1349, complaining that the
streets and lanes of London were “foul with human faeces and the
air of the city poisoned to the great danger of men passing,
especially in this time of infectious disease.” Removed as he
probably was from the daily sight of corpses piling up, the King
ordered that the streets be cleaned “as of old.”
Stern measures of quarantine were ordered by many cities. As
soon as Pisa and Lucca were aicted, their neighbor Pistoia forbade
any of its citizens who might be visiting or doing business in the
stricken cities to return home, and likewise forbade the importation
of wool and linen. The Doge and Council of Venice ordered burial
on the islands to a depth of at least ve feet and organized a barge
service to transport the corpses. Poland established a quarantine at
its frontiers which succeeded in giving it relative immunity.
Draconian means were adopted by the despot of Milan, Archbishop
Giovanni Visconti, head of the most uninhibited ruling family of the
14th century. He ordered that the rst three houses in which the
plague was discovered were to be walled up with their occupants
inside, enclosing the well, the sick, and the dead in a common tomb.
Whether or not owing to his promptitude, Milan escaped lightly in
the roll of the dead. With something of the Visconti temperament, a
manorial autocrat of Leicestershire burned and razed the village of
Noseley when the plague appeared there, to prevent its spread to
the manor house. He evidently succeeded, for his direct descendants
still inhabit Noseley Hall.

St. Roch, credited with special healing powers, who had died in
1327, was the particular saint associated with the plague. Inheriting
wealth as a young man, as had St. Francis, he had distributed it to
the poor and to hospitals, and while returning from a pilgrimage to
Rome had encountered an epidemic and stayed to help the sick.
Catching the malady himself, he retreated to die alone in the woods,
where a dog brought him bread each day. “In these sad times,” says
his legend, “when reality was so somber and men so hard, people
ascribed pity to animals.” St. Roch recovered and, on appearing in
rags as a beggar, was thought to be a spy and thrown into jail,
where he died, lling the cell with a strange light. As his story
spread and sainthood was conferred, it was believed that God would
cure of the plague anyone who invoked his name. When this failed
to occur, it enhanced the belief that, men having grown too wicked,
God indeed intended their end. As Langland wrote,
God is deaf now-a-days and deigneth not hear us,
And prayers have no power the Plague to stay.
In a terrible reversal, St. Roch and other saints now came to be
considered a source of the plague, as instruments of God’s wrath. “In
the time of that great mortality in the year of our Lord 1348,” wrote
a professor of law named Bartolus of Sassoferrato, “the hostility of
God was stronger than the hostility of man.” But he was wrong.
The hostility of man proved itself against the Jews. On charges
that they were poisoning the wells, with intent “to kill and destroy
the whole of Christendom and have lordship over all the world,” the
lynchings began in the spring of 1348 on the heels of the rst
plague deaths. The rst attacks occurred in Narbonne and
Carcassonne, where Jews were dragged from their houses and
thrown into bonres. While Divine punishment was accepted as the
plague’s source, people in their misery still looked for a human
agent upon whom to vent the hostility that could not be vented on
God. The Jew, as the eternal stranger, was the most obvious target.
He was the outsider who had separated himself by choice from the
Christian world, whom Christians for centuries had been taught to

hate, who was regarded as imbued with unsleeping malevolence
against all Christians. Living in a distinct group of his own kind in a
particular street or quarter, he was also the most feasible target,
with property to loot as a further inducement.
The accusation of well-poisoning was as old as the plague of
Athens, when it had been applied to the Spartans, and as recent as
the epidemics of 1320–21, when it had been applied to the lepers.
At that time the lepers were believed to have acted at the instigation
of the Jews and the Moslem King of Granada, in a great conspiracy
of outcasts to destroy Christians. Hundreds were rounded up and
burned throughout France in 1322 and the Jews heavily punished
by an ocial ne and unocial attacks. When the plague came, the
charge was instantly revived against the Jews:
… rivers and fountains
That were clear and clean
They poisoned in many places …
wrote the French court poet Guillaume de Machaut.
The antagonism had ancient roots. The Jew had become the
object of popular animosity because the early Church, as an oshoot
of Judaism striving to replace the parent, had to make him so. His
rejection of Christ as Saviour and his dogged refusal to accept the
new law of the Gospel in place of the Mosaic law made the Jew a
perpetual insult to the newly established Church, a danger who
must be kept distinct and apart from the Christian community. This
was the purpose of the edicts depriving Jews of their civil rights
issued by the early Church Councils in the 4th century as soon as
Christianity became the state religion. Separation was a two-way
street, since, to the Jews, Christianity was at rst a dissident sect,
then an apostasy with which they wanted no contact.
The theory, emotions, and justications of anti-Semitism were
laid at that time—in the canon law codied by the Councils; in the
tirades of St. John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Antioch, who
denounced the Jews as Christ-killers; in the judgment of St.
Augustine, who declared the Jews to be “outcasts” for failing to

accept redemption by Christ. The Jews’ dispersion was regarded as
their punishment for unbelief.
The period of active assault began with the age of the crusades,
when all Europe’s intramural antagonisms were gathered into one
bolt aimed at the indel. On the theory that the “indel at home”
should likewise be exterminated, massacres of Jewish communities
marked the crusaders’ march to Palestine. The capture of the Holy
Sepulcher by the Moslems was blamed on “the wickedness of the
Jews,” and the cry “HEP! HEP!” for Hierosolyma est Perdita (Jerusalem is
lost) became the call for murder. What man victimizes he fears;
thus, the Jews were pictured as ends lled with hatred of the
human race, which they secretly intended to destroy.
The question whether Jews had certain human rights, under the
general proposition that God created the world for all men including
indels, was given dierent answers by dierent thinkers. Ocially
the Church conceded some rights: that Jews should not be
condemned without trial, their synagogues and cemeteries should
not be profaned, their property not be robbed with impunity. In
practice this meant little because, as non-citizens of the universal
Christian state, Jews were not allowed to bring charges against
Christians, nor was Jewish testimony allowed to prevail over that of
Christians. Their legal status was that of serfs of the king, though
without reciprocal obligations on the part of the overlord. The
doctrine that Jews were doomed to perpetual servitude as Christ-
killers was announced by Pope Innocent III in 1205 and led Thomas
Aquinas to conclude with relentless logic that “since Jews are the
slaves of the Church, she can dispose of their possessions.” Legally,
politically, and physically, they were totally vulnerable.
They maintained a place in society because as moneylenders they
performed a role essential to the kings’ continuous need of money.
Excluded by the guilds from crafts and trades, they had been pushed
into petty commerce and moneylending although theoretically
barred from dealing with Christians. Theory, however, bends to
convenience, and Jews provided Christians with a way around their
self-imposed ban on using money to make money.

Since they were damned anyway, they were permitted to lend at
interest rates of 20 percent and more, of which the royal treasury
took the major share. The increment to the crown was in fact a form
of indirect taxation; as its instruments, the Jews absorbed an added
measure of popular hate. They lived entirely dependent upon the
king’s protection, subject to conscations and expulsions and the
hazards of royal favor. Nobles and prelates followed the royal
example, entrusting money to the Jews for lending and taking most
of the prots, while deecting popular resentment upon the agent.
To the common man the Jews were not only Christ-killers but
rapacious, merciless monsters, symbols of the new force of money
that was changing old ways and dissolving old ties.
As commerce swelled in the 12th and 13th centuries, increasing
the ow of money, the Jews’ position deteriorated in proportion as
they were less needed. They could not deal in the great sums that
Christian banking houses like the Bardi of Florence could command.
Kings and princes requiring ever larger amounts now turned to the
Lombards and wealthy merchants for loans and relaxed their
protection of the Jews or, when in need of hard cash, decreed their
expulsion while conscating their property and the debts owed to
them. At the same time, with the advent of the Inquisition in the
13th century, religious intolerance waxed, leading to the charge of
ritual murder against the Jews and the enforced wearing of a
distinctive badge.
The belief that Jews performed ritual murder of Christian victims,
supposedly from a compulsion to re-enact the Crucixion, began in
the 12th century and developed into the belief that they held secret
rites to desecrate the host. Promoted by popular preachers, a
mythology of blood grew in a mirror image of the Christian ritual of
drinking the blood of the Saviour. Jews were believed to kidnap and
torture Christian children, whose blood they drank for a variety of
sinister purposes ranging from sadism and sorcery to the need, as
unnatural beings, for Christian blood to give them a human
appearance. Though bitterly refuted by the rabbis and condemned
by emperor and pope, the blood libel took possession of the popular
mind most rabidly in Germany, where the well-poisoning charge too

had originated in the 12th century. The blood libel formed the
subject of Chaucer’s tale of a child martyr told by the Prioresse and
was the ground on which many Jews were charged, tried, and
burned at the stake.
Under the zeal of St. Louis, whose life’s object was the greater
glory and fulllment of Christian doctrine, Jewish life in France was
narrowed and harassed by mounting restrictions. The famous trial of
the Talmud for heresy and blasphemy took place in Paris in 1240
during his reign, ending in foreordained conviction and burning of
24 cartloads of Talmudic works. One of the disputants in the case
was Rabbi Moses ben Jacob of Coucy, intellectual leader of the
northern Jewish community in the time of Enguerrand III.
Throughout the century the Church multiplied decrees designed
to isolate Jews from Christian society, on the theory that contact
with them brought the Christian faith into disrepute. Jews were
forbidden to employ Christians as servants, to serve as doctors to
Christians, to intermarry, to sell our, bread, wine, oil, shoes, or any
article of clothing to Christians, to deliver or receive goods, to build
new synagogues, to hold or claim land for non-payment of
mortgage. The occupations from which guild rules barred them
included weaving, metal-working, mining, tailoring, shoemaking,
goldsmithing, baking, milling, carpentry. To mark their separation,
Innocent III in 1215 decreed the wearing of a badge, usually in the
form of a wheel or circular patch of yellow felt, said to represent a
piece of money. Sometimes green or red-and-white, it was worn by
both sexes beginning between the ages of seven and fourteen. In its
struggle against all heresy and dissent, the 13th century Church
imposed the same badge on Moslems, on convicted heretics, and, by
some quirk in doctrine, on prostitutes. A hat with a point rather like
a horn, said to represent the Devil, was later added further to
distinguish the Jews.
Expulsions and persecutions were marked by one constant factor
—seizure of Jewish property. As the chronicler William of
Newburgh wrote of the massacre of York in 1190, the slaughter was
less the work of religious zeal than of bold and covetous men who
wrought “the business of their own greed.” The motive was the

same for ocial expulsion by towns or kings. When the Jews drifted
back to resettle in villages, market towns and particularly in cities,
they continued in moneylending and retail trade, kept pawnshops,
found an occupation as gravediggers, and lived close together in a
narrow Jewish quarter for mutual protection. In Provence, drawing
on their contact with the Arabs of Spain and North Africa, they were
scholars and sought-after physicians. But the vigorous inner life of
their earlier communities had faded. In an excitable period they
lived on the edge of assault that was always imminent, It was
understood that the Church could “justly ordain war upon them” as
enemies of Christendom.
In the torment of the plague it was easy to credit Jewish
malevolence with poisoning the wells. In 1348 Clement VI issued a
Bull prohibiting the killing, looting, or forcible conversion of Jews
without trial, which halted the attacks in Avignon and the Papal
States but was ignored as the rage swept northward. Authorities in
most places tried at rst to protect the Jews, but succumbed to
popular pressure, not without an eye to potential forfeit of Jewish
property.
In Savoy, where the rst formal trials were held in September
1348, the Jews’ property was conscated while they remained in
prison pending investigation of charges. Composed from confessions
extracted by torture according to the usual medieval method, the
charges drew a picture of an international Jewish conspiracy
emanating from Spain, with messengers from Toledo carrying
poison in little packets or in a “narrow stitched leather bag.” The
messengers allegedly brought rabbinical instructions for sprinkling
the poison in wells and springs, and consulted with their co-
religionists in secret meetings. Duly found guilty, the accused were
condemned to death. Eleven Jews were burned alive and the rest
subjected to a tax of 160 orins every month over the next six years
for permission to remain in Savoy.
The confessions obtained in Savoy, distributed by letter from
town to town, formed the basis for a wave of accusations and
attacks throughout Alsace, Switzerland, and Germany. At a meeting
of representatives of Alsatian towns, the oligarchy of Strasbourg

attempted to refute the charges but were overwhelmed by the
majority demanding reprisal and expulsion. The persecutions of the
Black Death were not all spontaneous outbursts but action seriously
discussed beforehand.
Again Pope Clement attempted to check the hysteria in a Bull of
September 1348 in which he said that Christians who imputed the
pestilence to the Jews had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil,”
and that the charge of well-poisoning and ensuing massacres were a
“horrible thing.” He pointed out that “by a mysterious decree of
God” the plague was aicting all peoples, including Jews; that it
raged in places where no Jews lived, and that elsewhere they were
victims like everyone else; therefore the charge that they caused it
was “without plausibility.” He urged the clergy to take Jews under
their protection as he himself oered to do in Avignon, but his voice
was hardly heard against local animus.
In Basle on January 9, 1349, the whole community of several
hundred Jews was burned in a wooden house especially constructed
for the purpose on an island in the Rhine, and a decree was passed
that no Jew should be allowed to settle in Basle for 200 years. In
Strasbourg the Town Council, which opposed persecution, was
deposed by vote of the guilds and another was elected, prepared to
comply with the popular will. In February 1349, before the plague
had yet reached the city, the Jews of Strasbourg, numbering 2,000,
were taken to the burial ground, where all except those who
accepted conversion were burned at rows of stakes erected to
receive them.
By now another voice was fomenting attack upon the Jews. The
agellants had appeared. In desperate supplication for God’s mercy,
their movement erupted in a sudden frenzy that sped across Europe
with the same ery contagion as the plague. Self-agellation was
intended to express remorse and expiate the sins of all. As a form of
penance to induce God to forgive sin, it long antedated the plague
years. The agellants saw themselves as redeemers who, by re-
enacting the scourging of Christ upon their own bodies and making
the blood ow, would atone for human wickedness and earn
another chance for mankind.

Organized groups of 200 to 300 and sometimes more (the
chroniclers mention up to 1,000) marched from city to city, stripped
to the waist, scourging themselves with leather whips tipped with
iron spikes until they bled. While they cried aloud to Christ and the
Virgin for pity, and called upon God to “Spare us!”, the watching
townspeople sobbed and groaned in sympathy. These bands put on
regular performances three times a day, twice in public in the
church square and a third in privacy. Organized under a lay Master
for a stated period, usually 33½ days to represent Christ’s years on
earth, the participants were required to pledge self-support at 4
pence a day or other xed rate and to swear obedience to the
Master. They were forbidden to bathe, shave, change their clothes,
sleep in beds, talk or have intercourse with women without the
Master’s permission. Evidently this was not withheld, since the
agellants were later charged with orgies in which whipping
combined with sex. Women accompanied the groups in a separate
section, bringing up the rear. If a woman or priest entered the circle
of the ceremony, the act of penance was considered void and had to
be begun over again. The movement was essentially anti-clerical, for
in challenge to the priesthood, the agellants were taking upon
themselves the role of interceders with God for all humanity.
Breaking out now in the German states, the new eruption
advanced through the Low Countries to Flanders and Picardy as far
as Reims. Hundreds of bands roamed the land, entering new towns
every week, exciting already overwrought emotions, reciting hymns
of woe and claims that but for them “all Christendom would meet
perdition.” The inhabitants greeted them with reverence and ringing
of church bells, lodged them in their houses, brought children to be
healed and, in at least one case, to be resurrected. They dipped
cloths in the agellants’ blood, which they pressed to their eyes and
preserved as relics. Many, including knights and ladies, clerics,
nuns, and children, joined the bands. Soon the agellants were
marching behind magnicent banners of velvet and cloth of gold
embroidered for them by women enthusiasts.
Growing in arrogance, they became overt in antagonism to the
Church. The Masters assumed the right to hear confession and grant

absolution or impose penance, which not only denied the priests
their fee for these services but challenged ecclesiastical authority at
its core. Priests who intervened against them were stoned and the
populace was incited to join in the stoning. Opponents were
denounced as scorpions and Anti-Christs. Organized in some cases
by apostate priests or fanatic dissidents, the agellants took
possession of churches, disrupted services, ridiculed the Eucharist,
looted altars, and claimed the power to cast out evil spirits and raise
the dead. The movement that began as an attempt through self-
inicted pain to save the world from destruction, caught the
infection of power hunger and aimed at taking over the Church.
They began to be feared as a source of revolutionary ferment and
a threat to the propertied class, lay as well as ecclesiastical. The
Emperor Charles IV petitioned the Pope to suppress the agellants,
and his appeal was augmented by the no less imperial voice of the
University of Paris. At such a time, when the world seemed to be on
the brink of doom, to take action against the agellants who
claimed to be under Divine inspiration was not an easy decision.
Several of the cardinals at Avignon opposed repressive measures.
The self-torturers meanwhile had found a better victim. In every
town they entered, the agellants rushed for the Jewish quarter,
trailed by citizens howling for revenge upon the “poisoners of the
wells.” In Freiburg, Augsburg, Nürnberg, Munich, Königsberg,
Regensburg, and other centers, the Jews were slaughtered with a
thoroughness that seemed to seek the nal solution. At Worms in
March 1349 the Jewish community of 400, like that of York, turned
to an old tradition and burned themselves to death inside their own
houses rather than be killed by their enemies. The larger community
of Frankfurt-am-Main took the same way in July, setting re to part
of the city by their ames. In Cologne the Town Council repeated
the Pope’s argument that Jews were dying of the plague like
everyone else, but the agellants collected a great proletarian crowd
of “those who had nothing to lose,” and paid no attention. In Mainz,
which had the largest Jewish community in Europe, its members
turned at last to self-defense. With arms collected in advance they
killed 200 of the mob, an act which only served to bring down upon

them a furious onslaught by the townspeople in revenge for the
death of Christians. The Jews fought until overpowered; then
retreating to their homes, they too set their own res. Six thousand
were said to have perished at Mainz on August 24, 1349. Of 3,000
Jews at Erfurt, none was reported to have survived.
Completeness is rare in history, and Jewish chroniclers may have
shared the medieval addiction to sweeping numbers. Usually a
number saved themselves by conversion, and groups of refugees
were given shelter by Rupert of the Palatinate and other princes.
Duke Albert II of Austria, grand-uncle of Enguerrand VII, was one of
the few who took measures eective enough to protect the Jews
from assault in his territories. The last pogroms took place in
Antwerp and in Brussels where in December 1349 the entire Jewish
community was exterminated. By the time the plague had passed,
few Jews were left in Germany or the Low Countries.
By this time Church and state were ready to take the risk of
suppressing the agellants. Magistrates ordered town gates closed
against them; Clement VI in a Bull of October 1349 called for their
dispersal and arrest; the University of Paris denied their claim of
Divine inspiration. Philip VI promptly forbade public agellation on
pain of death; local rulers pursued the “masters of error,” seizing,
hanging, and beheading. The agellants disbanded and ed,
“vanishing as suddenly as they had come,” wrote Henry of Hereford,
“like night phantoms or mocking ghosts.” Here and there the bands
lingered, not entirely suppressed until 1357.
Homeless ghosts, the Jews ltered back from eastern Europe,
where the expelled had gone. Two Jews reappeared in Erfurt as
visitors in 1354 and, joined by others, started a resettlement three
years later. By 1365 the community numbered 86 taxable hearths
and an additional number of poor households below the tax-paying
level. Here and elsewhere they returned to live in weakened and
fearful communities on worse terms and in greater segregation than
before. Well-poisoning and its massacres had xed the malevolent
image of the Jew into a stereotype. Because Jews were useful, towns
which had enacted statutes of banishment invited or allowed their
re-entry, but imposed new disabilities. Former contacts of scholars,

physicians, and nancial “court Jews” with the Gentile community
faded. The period of the Jews’ medieval ourishing was over. The
walls of the ghetto, though not yet physical, had risen.
What was the human condition after the plague? Exhausted by
deaths and sorrows and the morbid excesses of fear and hate, it
ought to have shown some profound eects, but no radical change
was immediately visible. The persistence of the normal is strong.
While dying of the plague, the tenants of Bruton Priory in England
continued to pay the heriot owed to the lord at death with such
obedient regularity that fty oxen and cattle were received by the
priory within a few months. Social change was to come invisibly
with time; immediate eects were many but not uniform. Simon de
Covino believed the plague had a baneful eect upon morals,
“lowering virtue throughout the world.” Gilles li Muisis, on the
other hand, thought there had been an improvement in public
morals because many people formerly living in concubinage had
now married (as a result of town ordinances), and swearing and
gambling had so diminished that manufacturers of dice were turning
their product into beads for telling paternosters.
The marriage rate undoubtedly rose, though not for love. So many
adventurers took advantage of orphans to obtain rich dowries that
the oligarchy of Siena forbade the marriage of female orphans
without their kinsmen’s consent. In England, Piers Plowman
deplored the many pairs “since the pestilence” who had married
“for greed of goods and against natural feeling,” with result,
according to him, in “guilt and grief … jealousy, joylessness and
jangling in private”—and no children. It suited Piers as a moralist
that such marriages should be barren. Jean de Venette, on the other
hand, says of the marriages that followed the plague that many
twins, sometimes triplets, were born and that few women were
barren. Perhaps he in turn reected a desperate need to believe that
nature would make up the loss, and in fact men and women married
immediately afterward in unusual numbers.

Unlike the dice transformed into prayer beads, people did not
improve, although it had been expected, according to Matteo
Villani, that the experience of God’s wrath would have left them
“better men, humble, virtuous and Catholic.” Instead, “They forgot
the past as though it had never been and gave themselves up to a
more disordered and shameful life than they had led before.” With a
glut of merchandise on the shelves for too few customers, prices at
rst plunged and survivors indulged in a wild orgy of spending. The
poor moved into empty houses, slept on beds, and ate o silver.
Peasants acquired unclaimed tools and livestock, even a wine press,
forge, or mill left without owners, and other possessions they never
had before. Commerce was depressed, but the amount of currency
was in greater supply because there were fewer people to share it.
Behavior grew more reckless and callous, as it often does after a
period of violence and suering. It was blamed on parvenus and the
newly rich who pushed up from below. Siena renewed its sumptuary
laws in 1349 because many persons were pretending to higher
position than belonged to them by birth or occupation. But, on the
whole, local studies of tax rolls indicate that while the population
may have been halved, its social proportions remained about the
same.
Because of intestate deaths, property without heirs, and disputed
title to land and houses, a fury of litigation arose, made chaotic by
the shortage of notaries. Sometimes squatters, sometimes the
Church, took over emptied property. Fraud and extortion practiced
upon orphans by their appointed guardians became a scandal. In
Orvieto brawls kept breaking out; bands of homeless and starving
brigands roamed the countryside and pillaged up to the very gates
of the city. People were arrested for carrying arms and for acts of
vandalism, especially on vineyards. The commune had to enact new
regulations against “certain rascals, sons of iniquity” who robbed
and burned the premises of shopkeepers and craftsmen, and also
against increased prostitution. On March 12, 1350, the commune
reminded citizens of the severe penalty in store for sexual relations
between Christian and Jew: the woman involved would be
beheaded or burned alive.

Education suered from losses among the clergy. In France,
according to Jean de Venette, “few were found in houses, villas and
castles who were able and willing to instruct boys in grammar”—a
situation that could have touched the life of Enguerrand VII. To ll
vacant beneces the Church ordained priests in batches, many of
them men who had lost their wives or families in the plague and
ocked to holy orders as a refuge. Many were barely literate, “as it
were mere lay folk” who might read a little but without
understanding. Priests who survived the plague, declared the
Archbishop of Canterbury in 1350, had become “infected by
insatiable avarice,” charging excessive fees and neglecting souls.
By a contrary trend, education was stimulated by concern for the
survival of learning, which led to a spurt in the founding of
universities. Notably the Emperor Charles IV, an intellectual, felt
keenly the cause of “precious knowledge which the mad rage of
pestilential death has stied throughout the wide realms of the
world.” He founded the University of Prague in the plague year of
1348 and issued imperial accreditation to ve other universities—
Orange, Perugia, Siena, Pavia, and Lucca—in the next ve years. In
the same ve years three new colleges were founded at Cambridge
—Trinity, Corpus Christi, and Clare—although love of learning, like
love in marriage, was not always the motive. Corpus Christi was
founded in 1352 because fees for celebrating masses for the dead
were so inated after the plague that two guilds of Cambridge
decided to establish a college whose scholars, as clerics, would be
required to pray for their deceased members.
Under the circumstances, education did not everywhere ourish.
Dwindling attendance at Oxford was deplored in sermons by the
masters. At the University of Bologna, mourned Petrarch twenty
years later (in a series of letters called “Of Senile Things”), where
once there was “nothing more joyous, nothing more free in the
world,” hardly one of all the former great lecturers was left, and in
the place of so many great geniuses, “a universal ignorance has
seized the city.” But pestilence was not alone responsible; wars and
other troubles had added their scars.

The obvious and immediate result of the Black Death was, of
course, a shrunken population, which, owing to wars, brigandage,
and recurrence of the plague, declined even further by the end of
the 14th century. The plague laid a curse on the century in the form
of its own bacillus. Lodged in the vectors, it was to break out again
six times over the next six decades in various localities at varying
intervals of ten to fteen years. After killing o most of those
susceptible, with increasing mortality of children in the later phases,
it eventually receded, leaving Europe with a population reduced by
about 40 percent in 1380 and by nearly 50 percent at the end of the
century. The city of Béziers in southern France, which had 14,000
inhabitants in 1304, numbered 4,000 a century later. The shing
port of Jonquières near Marseille, which once had 354 taxable
hearths, was reduced to 135. The ourishing cities of Carcassonne
and Montpellier shrank to shadows of their former prosperity, as did
Rouen, Arras, Laon, and Reims in the north. The vanishing of
taxable material caused rulers to raise rates of taxation, arousing
resentment that was to explode in repeated outbreaks in coming
decades.
As between landowner and peasant, the balance of
impoverishment and enrichment caused by the plague on the whole
favored the peasant, although what was true in one place often had
an equal and opposite reaction somewhere else. The relative values
of land and labor were turned upside down. Peasants found their
rents reduced and even relinquished for one or more years by
landowners desperate to keep their elds in cultivation. Better no
revenue at all than that cleared land should be retaken by the
wilderness. But with fewer hands to work, cultivated land
necessarily shrank The archives of the Abbey of Ramsay in England
show that thirty years after the plague the acreage sowed in grain
was less than half what it had been before. Five plows owned by the
abbey in 1307 were reduced to one a century later, and twenty-
eight oxen to ve.
Hill farms and sections of poor soil were let go or turned to
pasture for sheep, which required less labor. Villages weakened by
depopulation and unable to resist the enclosure of land for sheep

were deserted in increasing numbers. Property boundaries vanished
when elds reverted to wasteland. If claimed by someone who was
able to cultivate them, former owners or their heirs could not collect
rent. Landowners impoverished by these factors sank out of sight or
let castles and manors decay while they entered the military
brigandage that was to be the curse of the following decades.
When death slowed production, goods became scarce and prices
soared. In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350. At
the same time the shortage of labor brought the plague’s greatest
social disruption—a concerted demand for higher wages. Peasants
as well as artisans, craftsmen, clerks, and priests discovered the
lever of their own scarcity. Within a year after the plague had
passed through northern France, the textile workers of St. Omer
near Amiens had gained three successive wage increases. In many
guilds artisans struck for higher pay and shorter hours. In an age
when social conditions were regarded as xed, such action was
revolutionary.
The response of rulers was instant repression. In the eort to hold
wages at pre-plague levels, the English issued an ordinance in 1349
requiring everyone to work for the same pay as in 1347. Penalties
were established for refusal to work, for leaving a place of
employment to seek higher pay, and for the oer of higher pay by
employers. Proclaimed when Parliament was not sitting, the
ordinance was reissued in 1351 as the Statute of Laborers. It
denounced not only laborers who demanded higher wages but
particularly those who chose “rather to beg in idleness than to earn
their bread in labor.” Idleness of the worker was a crime against
society, for the medieval system rested on his obligation to work.
The Statute of Laborers was not simply a reactionary dream but an
eort to maintain the system. It provided that every able-bodied
person under sixty with no means of subsistence must work for
whoever required him, that no alms could be given to able-bodied
beggars, that a vagrant serf could be forced to work for anyone who
claimed him. Down to the 20th century this statute was to serve as
the basis for “conspiracy” laws against labor in the long struggle to
prevent unionization.

A more realistic French statute of 1351, applying only to the
region of Paris, allowed a rise in wages not to exceed one third of
the former level. Prices were xed and prots of middlemen were
regulated. To increase production, guilds were required to loosen
their restrictions on the number of apprentices and shorten the
period before they could become masters.
In both countries, as shown by repeated renewals of the laws with
rising penalties, the statutes were unenforceable. Violations cited by
the English Parliament in 1352 show workers demanding and
employers paying wages at double and treble the pre-plague rate.
Stocks were ordered set up in every town for punishment of
oenders. In 1360 imprisonment replaced nes as the penalty and
fugitive laborers were declared outlaws. If caught, they were to be
branded on the forehead with F for “fugitive” (or possibly for
“falsity”). New laws were enacted twice more in the 1360s, breeding
the resistance that was to come to a head in the great outbreak of
1381.
The sense of sin induced by the plague found surcease in the
plenary indulgence oered by the Jubilee Year of 1350 to all who in
that year made the pilgrimage to Rome. Originally established by
Boniface VIII in 1300, the Jubilee was intended to make an
indulgence available to all repentant and confessed sinners free of
charge—that is, if they could aord the journey to Rome. Boniface
intended the Jubilee Year as a centennial event, but the rst one
had been such an enormous success, attracting a reported two
million visitors to Rome in the course of the year, that the city,
impoverished by the loss of the papacy to Avignon, petitioned
Clement VI to shorten the interval to fty years. The Pope of the
joyous murals operated on the amiable principle that “a ponti
should make his subjects happy.” He complied with Rome’s request
in a Bull of 1343.
Momentously for the Church, Clement formulated in the same
Bull the theory of indulgences, and xed its fatal equation with
money. The sacrice of Christ’s blood, he stated, together with the

merit added by the Virgin and saints, had established an
inexhaustible treasury for the use of pardons. By contributing sums
to the Church, anyone could buy a share in the Treasury of Merit.
What the Church gained in revenue by this arrangement was
matched in the end by loss in respect.
In 1350 pilgrims thronged the roads to Rome, camping around
res 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 ponti the Eternal City was destitute,
the three chief basilicas in ruins, San Paolo toppled by the
earthquake, the Lateran half-collapsed. Rubble and ruin lled the
streets, the seven hills were silent and deserted, goats nibbled in the
weed-grown cloisters of deserted convents. The sight of rooess
churches exposed to wind and rain, lamented Petrarch, “would
excite pity in a heart of stone.” Nevertheless, famous saints’ relics
raked in lavish oerings, 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 gures, 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 o in a state of sin, the result was a ood
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 orins 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 agellants, 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 oensive weapons,” and tried to set
re 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 inicted. 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 suciently
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, pued up, pompous and sumptuous in
luxuries. If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the beneces 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, nding themselves neither destroyed nor
improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had
suered. 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 xed 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 xed 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 fty years for
the psychological eects to develop. These were the fty-odd years
of the youth and adult life of Enguerrand de Coucy.
A strange personication of Death emerged from the plague years
on the painted walls of the Camposanto in Pisa. The gure 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 personied as a skeleton with hourglass and
scythe, in a white shroud or bare-boned, grinning at the irony of
man’s fate reected 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 irt 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 gures 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 cons containing corpses in dierent 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 stiens in
fright with outstretched neck and aring 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
The Battle of Poitiers
ardly emerged from the plague, France moved toward a
military debacle that was to release a ood 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 disaection 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 eld to erase his father’s
defeats of the past decade, and on the rst day of his reign notied
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 rst 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 rst 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 xed 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 gure 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, oering 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 oce of Constable
to his relative and favorite, Charles d’Espagne, who was said to be
the object of the King’s “dishonest aection,” and to have persuaded
Jean to murder Comte d’Eu so that he himself might have his oce.
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 rst 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 fteen Breton lords who
were his prisoners.
In the warfare of the 1340s, Jean had besieged the English at
Aiguillon for four months without success, showing himself,
according to report, resistant to any advice, obstinate, and “hard to
move when he had taken an opinion.” His most notable talent was
for satisfying an exceptional avidity for money. He shared the Valois
interest in arts and letters at least to the extent of commissioning
French translations of the Bible and the Roman historian Livy and
carrying books in his baggage when on campaign. As King he had
his court painter, Girard d’Orléans, decorate his toilet stools, and he
accumulated 239 tapestries made for his own use. His taste for
luxury extended to everything but ministers, for he inherited from
his father and kept in oce a shady group, neither capable nor
honest, who were despised by the nobles because they were of
common birth and hated by the bourgeois for their avarice and
venality. One of them, Simon de Buci, president of Parlement and
member of the Secret Council, twice overreached himself in some
way that required successive pardons. Robert de Lorris, the King’s
chamberlain and Master of Accounts, was restored to oce after
surviving a charge of treason and another of embezzlement. Jean
Poilevain, who was imprisoned for peculation, prudently obtained a
letter of pardon before his case was judged. As nanciers for the

King, men like these were a central source of disaection with his
regime.
Jean’s rst notable administrative act was a serious eort toward
military coherence. It was becoming evident that the baronial right
of independent withdrawal in the eld, and independent response to
the King’s summons, crippled large military endeavor. Half feudal,
half mercenary, not yet national, the ad hoc collection that was the
14th century army was too subject to the private interests of its
components to be a reliable instrument. The Royal Ordinance of
April 1351 was an attempt to introduce, as far as knightly terms
allowed, principles of dependability and command.
By raising rates of pay to meet the ination caused by the Black
Death, the ordinance conrmed the fact that the warrior’s function
had become a trade for the poorer knights if not the grand
seigneurs. The new rates under the ordinance were xed at 40 sous
(two livres) a day for a banneret, 20 sous for a knight, 10 for a
squire, 5 for a valet, 3 for a foot soldier, 2½ for an armor-bearer or
other attendant.
More signicant was a provision designed to correct a critical
fault on the medieval battleeld: the right of independent
withdrawal. The new rule stipulated that every man in the host be
subordinate to some captain and required an oath from all of the
men “not to leave the company of their captain” without an order—
that is, not to withdraw at will. An indication of how fragile was a
commander’s reliance on the force he could expect to deploy, the
ordinance also required captains of companies to notify the chief of
battalion that they would be present at a forthcoming battle.
The ordinance proved ineective chiey for lack of dependable
revenue to support an organized army. Provisioning added to the
cost of wages. While local peasantry, paid or pillaged, usually
furnished food and horses’ forage, a major expedition or siege or
eet at sea required organized supply of biscuit, smoked or salted
meat and sh, wine, oil, and oats and hay for the horses. Ordinarily
knights ate white bread made from wheat, meat in the form of beef,
pork, and mutton, and drank wine daily. The common soldier
received wine only on feast days or in active combat; otherwise he

drank beer, ale, or cider, and ate rye bread, peas, and beans. Fish,
cheese, olive oil, occasionally butter, salt, vinegar, onions, and
garlic also gured in the rations. Poultry was so widely consumed
and easily obtained that it was not recorded. Sugar, honey, mustard,
spices, and almonds were kept for the wounded and sick and the
privileged. On active duty, soldiers did not fast but were allotted
sh as substitute for meat on the twelve “thin” days a month. The
more continuous war became, as it did in the 14th century, the
more organization and money it required.
The crown grasped for money by every means and favored the
least scrupulous, which was debasing the coinage. Less directly
obvious than aids and subsidies, it required no summoning of the
Estates for consent. Coins called in were re-minted with a lower
proportion of gold or silver and re-circulated at the old face value,
with the dierence being retained by the Treasury. Since the petty
coins of daily use were those aected, the system reduced the real
wages and purchasing power of the common people while bankers,
merchants, and nobles, whose movable wealth was in large gold
coins or gold and silver vessels and plate, were less aected. Under
Jean II, manipulations were so frequent and erratic that they upset
all values and succeeded in damaging and infuriating everyone
except the manipulators themselves and those who could prot by
holding back their gold. Abbot Gilles li Muisis of Tournai found the
mysteries of the coinage even more obscure than the plague and was
inspired to a famous verse:
Money and currency are very strange things.
They keep on going up and down and no one knows why;
If you want to win, you lose, however hard you try.
In 1351, the rst year of Jean’s reign, the currency suered eighteen
alterations, and seventy in the course of the next decade.
The King’s personal idea for improving the military arm was to
found an order of chivalry modeled, like King Edward’s recently

founded Order of the Garter, on the Knights of the Round Table.
Jean’s Order of the Star was intended to rival the Garter, revive
French prestige, and weld the splintered loyalty of his nobles to the
Valois monarchy.
The orders of chivalry, with all their display and ritual and vows,
were essentially a way of trying to secure a loyal body of military
support on which the sovereign could rely. That was in fact the
symbolism of the Garter, a circlet to bind the Knight-Companions
mutually, and all of them jointly to the King as head of the Order.
First broached with much fanfare in 1344, the Order of the Garter
was originally intended to include 300 proved knights, starting with
the most worthy of the realm. When formally established ve years
later, it was reduced to an exclusive circle of 26 with St. George as
patron and ocial robes of blue and gold. Signicantly, the statutes
provided that no member was to leave the King’s domain without
his authority. The wearing of the Garter at the knee was further
intended, in the words of the Order’s historian, as a “Caveat and
Exhortation that the Knights should not pusillanimously (by running
away from Battle) betray the Valour and Renown which is ingrafted
in Constancy and Magnanimity.” Even knights of old knew fear and
ight.
Since Jean’s object was to be inclusive rather than exclusive, he
made the Order of the Star open to 500 members. Established “in
honor of God, of our Lady and for the heightening of chivalry and
augmenting of honor,” the full Order was to assemble once a year in
a ceremonial banquet hung with the blazons of all its members.
Companions were to wear a white tunic, a red or white surcoat
embroidered with a gold star, a red hat, enameled ring of special
design, black hose, and gilded shoes. They were to display a red
banner strewn with stars and embroidered with an image of Our
Lady.
At the annual banquet each would recite on oath all “the
adventures that befell him in the year both shameful and
honorable,” and clerks would take down the recitals in a book. The
Order would designate the three princes, three bannerets, and three

knights who during the year had done the most in arms of war, “for
no deed of arms in peace shall be taken into account.” This meant
no deed of private warfare as distinct from a war declared by the
sovereign. Equally signicant of the King’s intention was the
reappearance of the oath not to withdraw, worded more sternly
than in the ordinance and more explicitly than in the Order of the
Garter. Companions of the Star were required, to swear they would
never ee in battle more than four arpents (about 600 yards) by
their own estimate, “but rather die or be taken prisoner.”
While the purpose behind the orders was practical, the form was
already nostalgic. War had changed since the 12th century
romances from which men knew the legends of the 6th century
Round Table, if it ever existed. The legends had shaped chivalry as
the principle of order of the warrior class “without which the world
would be a confused thing.” But the quest of the Holy Grail was not
an adequate guide to realistic tactics.
Chivalry’s nest military expression in contemporary eyes was the
famous Combat of the Thirty in 1351. An action of the perennial
conict in Brittany, it began with a challenge to single combat
issued by Robert de Beaumanoir, a noble Breton on the French side,
to his opponent Bramborough of the Anglo-Breton party. When their
partisans clamored to join, a combat of thirty on each side was
agreed upon. Terms were arranged, the site was chosen, and after
participants heard mass and exchanged courtesies, the ght
commenced. With swords, bear-spears, daggers, and axes, they
fought savagely until four on the French side and two on the English
were slain and a recess was called. Bleeding and exhausted,
Beaumanoir called for a drink, eliciting the era’s most memorable
reply: “Drink thy blood, Beaumanoir, and thy thirst will pass!”
Resuming, the combatants fought until the French side prevailed
and every one of the survivors on either side was wounded.
Bramborough and eight of his party were killed, the rest taken
prisoner and held for ransom.
In the wide discussion the aair aroused, “some held it as a very
poor thing and others as a very swaggering business,” with the
admirers dominating. The combat was celebrated in verse, painting,

tapestry, and in a memorial stone erected on the site. More than
twenty years later Froissart noticed a scarred survivor at the table of
Charles V, where he was honored above all others. He told the ever-
inquiring chronicler that he owed his great favor with the King to
his having been one of the Thirty. The renown and honor the ght
earned reected the knight’s nostalgic vision of what battle should
be. While he practiced the warfare of havoc and pillage, he clung to
the image of himself as Sir Lancelot.
With dazzling municence, regardless of depleted nances, Jean
launched the Order of the Star at an opening ceremony on January
6, 1352. He donated all the robes and staged a magnicent banquet
in a hall draped with tapestries and hangings of gold and velvet
decorated with stars and eur-de-lys. Furniture was carved and
gilded for the occasion. After a solemn mass, the revels grew so
boisterous that a gold chalice was smashed and some rich draperies
stolen. While the knights caroused, the English seized the castle of
Guînes, whose absent captain was celebrating with his companions
of the Star.
To their own undoing, the companions of the Star took seriously
the oath not to ee from battle. In 1352, during the war in Brittany,
a French force led by Marshal Guy de Nesle was caught in ambush
at a place called Mauron by an Anglo-Breton force of about equal
numbers. The French could have ed and saved themselves but that
they were bound by their oath not to retreat. Though surrounded,
they stood and fought until virtually all were killed or captured. So
thick lay the dead on the eld that the body of Guy de Nesle was
not recovered until two days later. Seven French bannerets and 80
or 90 knights lost their lives not counting those captured, leaving so
great a hole in the Order of the Star as, “with the great mischiefs
and misfortunes that were to follow, caused the ruin of that noble
company.”
In France’s misfortunes a young man of twenty, Charles, King of
Navarre, grandson of Louis X, saw his opportunity. Whether he
really aimed at the French crown, or at revenge for wrongs done

him, or at stirring trouble for its own sake like Iago, is a riddle
concealed in one of the most complex characters of the 14th
century. A small slight youth with glistening eyes and a voluble ow
of words, he was volatile, intelligent, charming, violent, cunning as
a fox, ambitious as Lucifer, and more truly than Byron “mad, bad
and dangerous to know.” Seductive and eloquent, he could persuade
his peers or sway a mob. He allowed himself the same unbridled
acts of passion as Jean and other rulers, but, unlike Jean, he was a
plotter, subtle, bold, absolutely without scruple, but so swerving and
unxed of purpose as to undo his own plots. His only constancy was
hate. He is known to history as Charles the Bad.
Through his mother, daughter of Louis X, Charles of Navarre was
more directly descended from the last Capets than Jean II, but his
parents had renounced any claim to the crown when they
acknowledged Philip VI. They had been compensated by the
Kingdom of Navarre. The tiny mountain realm in the Pyrenees
oered their son too little scope, but as Count of Evreux he held a
great ef in Normandy where inuence could be exerted. This
became his main base of operations.
He was moved to action by jealousy and hatred of Charles
d’Espagne, the new Constable, upon whom the King with rash favor
had bestowed the county of Angoulème, which belonged to the
house of Navarre. After infuriating Charles of Navarre by taking his
territory, Jean, in fear of the result, tried to attach him by giving
him his eight-year-old daughter, Jeanne, in marriage. Almost
immediately he redoubled the rst damage by withholding his
daughter’s dowry, which did not make a friend of his new son-in-
law.
Charles of Navarre struck at the King through Charles d’Espagne.
With no taste for half-measures, he simply had him assassinated, not
without calculating that many nobles who equally hated the favorite
would rally to the man who removed him. He did not kill with his
own hands but through a party of henchmen led by his brother,
Philip of Navarre, joined by Count Jean d’Harcourt, two Harcourt
brothers, and other leading Norman nobles.

Seizing an occasion in January 1354 when the Constable was
visiting Normandy, they broke into the room where he was sleeping
naked (as was the medieval custom) and, with drawn swords
gleaming in the light of their torches, dragged him from his bed. On
his knees before Philip with hands clasped, Charles d’Espagne
begged for mercy, saying “he would be his serf, he would ransom
himself for gold, he would yield the land claimed, he would go
overseas and never return.” Count d’Harcourt urged Philip to have
pity, but the young man, lled with his brother’s rage and purpose,
would not listen. His men fell upon the helpless Constable so
“villainously and abominably” that they left his body pierced with
eighty wounds. Galloping to where Charles of Navarre was waiting,
they cried, “It is done! It is done!”
“What is done?” he asked for the record, and they answered, “The
Constable is dead.”
The audacity of the blow, as close to the King’s person as it was
possible to come, brought Charles of Navarre instantly to the
forefront as a political factor. The King at once declared his Norman
properties conscated, but this would have to be made good by
force.
Charles’s contemporaries generally ascribed his act to hatred and
revenge, but was it passion or calculation? While total absence of
inhibition was characteristic of persons born to rule, bizarre bursts
of violence were becoming more frequent in these years, perhaps as
a legacy of the Black Death and a sense of the insecurity of life. In
1354 one of the periodic town-gown riots at Oxford exploded in
such fury, with the use of Swords, daggers, and even bows and
arrows, that it ended in a massacre of students and the closing of the
university until the King took measures to protect its liberties. In
Italy in 1358 when Francesco Ordela, tyrant of Forlì, known for a
fearsome subitezza or quick temper, persisted in a last-ditch defense
of his city against the papal forces, his son Ludovico dared to plead
with him to yield rather than continue in war against the Church.
“You are either a bastard or a changeling!” roared the infuriated
father and, as his son turned away, drew a dagger and “stabbed him
in the back so that he died before midnight.” In a similar t of

ungovernable rage, the Count of Foix, who was married to a sister of
Charles of Navarre, killed his only legitimate son.
The age had long been accustomed to physical violence. In the
10th century a “Truce of God” had been formulated to meet the
craving for some relief from perpetual combat. During the truce,
ghting was to be suspended on saints’ days, Sundays, and Easter,
and all non-combatants—clerks, peasants, merchants, artisans, and
even animals—were to be left unharmed by men of the sword, and
all religious and public buildings safeguarded. That was the theory.
In practice, like other precepts of the Church, the Truce was a sieve
that failed to contain human behavior.
In England coroners’ rolls showed manslaughter far ahead of
accident as cause of death, and more often than not the oender
escaped punishment by obtaining benet of clergy through bribes or
the right connections. If life was lled with bodily harm, literature
reected it. One of La Tour Landry’s cautionary tales for his
daughters tells of a lady who ran o with a monk and, upon being
found in bed with him by her brothers, they “took a knife and cut
away the monk’s stones and threw them in the lady’s face and made
her eat them and afterwards tied both monk and lady in a sack with
heavy rocks and cast them into a river and drowned them.” Another
tale is of a husband who fetched his wife back from her parents’
house, where she had ed after a marital quarrel. While lodged
overnight in a town on the way home, the lady was attacked by a
“great number of young people wild and infect with lechery” who
“ravished her villainously,” causing her to die of shame and sorrow.
The husband cut her body into twelve pieces, each of which he sent
with a letter to certain of her friends that they might be made
ashamed of her running away from her husband and also be moved
to take vengeance on her ravishers. The friends at once assembled
with all their retainers and descended upon the town where the rape
had occurred and slew all its inhabitants.
Violence was ocial as well as individual. Torture was authorized
by the Church and regularly used to uncover heresy by the
Inquisition. The tortures and punishments of civil justice
customarily cut o hands and ears, racked, burned, ayed, and

pulled apart people’s bodies. In everyday life passersby saw some
criminal ogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron
collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated
heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls. In
every church they saw pictures of saints undergoing varieties of
atrocious martyrdom—by arrows, spears, re, cut-o breasts—
usually dripping blood. The Crucixion with its nails, spears, thorns,
whips, and more dripping blood was inescapable. Blood and cruelty
were ubiquitous in Christian art, indeed essential to it, for Christ
became Redeemer, and the saints sanctied, only through suering
violence at the hands of their fellow man.
In village games, players with hands tied behind them competed
to kill a cat nailed to a post by battering it to death with their heads,
at the risk of cheeks ripped open or eyes scratched out by the frantic
animal’s claws. Trumpets enhanced the excitement. Or a pig
enclosed in a wide pen was chased by men with clubs to the
laughter of spectators as he ran squealing from the blows until
beaten lifeless. Accustomed in their own lives to physical hardship
and injury, medieval men and women were not necessarily repelled
by the spectacle of pain, but rather enjoyed it. The citizens of Mons
bought a condemned criminal from a neighboring town so that they
should have the pleasure of seeing him quartered. It may be that the
untender medieval infancy produced adults who valued others no
more than they had been valued in their own formative years.
Charles of Navarre by his outrageous act became the attraction for
a growing group of nobles of northern France who were ready for a
movement of protest against the Valois crown. The old condition of
stress between barony and monarchy had been freshened by Philip’s
and Jean’s violent reprisals against nobles whom they suspected of
treachery, and by the military humiliations since Crécy.
Landowners, hurt by the ight of labor and reduced revenue from
their estates, tended to blame many of their troubles on the crown.
They resented the nancial pressures of the King and his despised
ministers, and pressed for reform and more local autonomy. From

his base in Normandy, Charles could become the focus of an
adversary group, and he proclaimed that intention like a cock
crowing.
“God knows it was I who with the help of God had Charles
d’Espagne killed,” he announced in a letter to Pope Innocent VI. He
described his murder of the Constable as a righteous response to
aronts and oenses, and expressed his devotion to the Holy See
and his solicitude for the Pope’s health. Charles was now prepared
to oer himself as an agent of England in return for English aid to
maintain his Norman possessions, and to this end he wanted to use
the Pope as intermediary. In a letter to King Edward he wrote that
by means of his castle and men in Normandy, he could do such
harm to Jean II “as he shall never recover from,” and he asked that
English forces in Brittany be sent to his support.
Throughout that year, 1354, the future course of the century
swayed between pressures for peace and others for continuing the
war. Pope Innocent VI, who was aged and sickly, was trying
urgently to bring about a settlement because he heard the sound of
the indel pounding at the gates. In 1353 the Turks had seized
Gallipoli, key of the Hellespont, and thereby entered Europe.
Christian energies must be united against them, which would be
impossible if France and England renewed their war.
Pressed by the Pope and by their empty treasuries, Edward and
Jean had entered negotiations for a permanent peace which neither
really wanted. Edward had used up his credit with the English
people for a war that neither ghting nor diplomacy could bring to
an end. The English Third Estate was nding that the costs
outweighed the spoils. In 1352 Parliament limited the King’s powers
of conscription. In April 1354 when the House of Commons was
asked by the Lord Chamberlain, “Do you desire a treaty of perpetual
peace if it can be had?” members unanimously cried, “Aye! Aye!”
On his side, Jean was trapped by fear of an arrangement between
Charles of Navarre and England. Medieval intelligence channels
rattled with the tale of his son-in-law’s conspiracies. And while
Charles was hostile, the King’s ability to raise troops and taxes from

Normandy was curtailed. Forced by humiliating necessity, he had to
swallow his fury, cancel his conscation of Charles’s Norman efs,
pardon him for the murder of Charles d’Espagne, and invite him to
Paris for a ceremony of reconciliation. Charles came because all his
life he could never resist another option, and perhaps because at 22
he was not as sure of himself as his acts proclaimed. With oaths and
embraces and elaborate formulas, the pretense was carried out in
March 1354 amid feelings between the two principals that need
only be imagined.
The year teetered on the edge of peace. The war was almost
settled by a treaty overwhelmingly to the advantage of England, but
at the last minute France stiened and refused. All that came of
three years’ parleys and the Pope’s zeal for peace was an extension
of the truce for one year while sparring was resumed. Once again
Charles of Navarre treated with Edward and promised to meet the
English at Cherbourg for a joint campaign.* Pope Innocent’s hopes
crashed in the collapse of the peace treaty. When he reproached the
King of England for conspiring with Charles of Navarre against the
King of France, Edward lied as easily as rulers of later times.
“Speaking truly and swearing faithfully by the heart of God,” he
denied the charge in writing “on the word of a King” although the
text of the correspondence exists.
In haste to renew the war, he proclaimed French perdy and the
righteousness of his cause in letters to the Archbishops of
Canterbury and York which were read by heralds to the public.
Sermons preached from the pulpit spread his tale of grievances.
Edward understood public relations. By one device or another, funds
were raised, consents wrung from Parliament, and eets, men, and
provisions assembled during the spring and summer of 1355. When
on Midsummer’s Day the truce expired without renewal, two
expeditionary forces were ready to sail, one under the Black Prince
for Bordeaux, one under the Duke of Lancaster for Normandy,
where it was intended to link up with Charles of Navarre.
With fair winds speeding his several-score ships, Prince Edward
reached Bordeaux in three or four days. He brought with him 1,000
knights, squires, and other men-at-arms, 2,000 archers, and a large

number of Welsh foot soldiers. Now 24, strongly built, with a full
mustache, the heir of King Edward was a hard and haughty prince
who was to gain immortal renown as “the Flower of Chivalry.” The
reputation was helped by his having the good fortune to die before
he was tarnished by the responsibilities of the throne. The French
saw him as “cruel in manner” and as “the proudest man ever born of
woman.”
The object of the Prince’s raid, extending 250 miles east to
Narbonne and back to Bordeaux in October-November 1355, was
not conquest but havoc, plus plunder. Never had the “famous,
beautiful and rich” land of Armagnac known such destruction as
was visited upon it in these two months. The havoc was not
purposeless but intended, like military terrorism in any age, to
punish or deter people from siding with the enemy. By sliding back
into French allegiance, the inhabitants of Guienne were considered
to be rebels against the King of England whom it was the Prince’s
duty to chastise. Such policy was bound to provoke hostility in and
around the territory England wanted to hold, but the Prince, who
was neither more nor less imaginative than most commanders, did
not look into the future. With the addition of Gascon allies, he had
collected a large force of about 9,000, consisting of 1,500 lances
(three men—a knight and two attendants—to a lance), 2,000
archers, and 3,000 foot. He intended to demonstrate English might,
convince local lords where their interest lay, and cut the French war
potential by damaging a region which furnished the French King
with rich revenues. Plunder would play its part both as prot and
pay.
“Harrying and wasting the country,” as the Prince wrote in
matter-of-fact description to the Bishop of Winchester, “we burned
Plaisance and other ne towns and all the lands around.” After
loading loot into the baggage wagons, rounding up cattle,
slaughtering pigs and chickens, the company proceeded to the
business of laying waste: burning granaries and mills, barns and
haystacks, smashing wine vats, cutting down vines and fruit trees,
wrecking bridges, and moving on. Bypassing Toulouse, they stormed
and burned Mont Giscar, where many men, women, and children

hitherto ignorant of war were maltreated and slain. The raiding
party plundered Carcassonne for three days without attacking the
citadel, “and the whole of the third day we remained for burning of
the said city.” The process was repeated at Narbonne. Strangely, the
French oered no organized resistance, despite the presence of
Marshal Jean de Clermont alongside the Count of Armagnac, the
King’s lieutenant in Languedoc. Beyond bringing people inside the
city walls where possible, Armagnac failed to come out against the
English except for an inconclusive skirmish on their way back.
His failure was probably owed to fear of a pounce at his back by
his opulent neighbor and mortal enemy, Gaston, Count of Foix. The
autonomies and rivalries of the great southern lords led to as
unquiet relations with the King as with each other. Called “Gaston
Phoebus” for his beauty and red-gold hair, Foix had ignored the
summons of Philip VI for defense of the realm in the year of Crécy.
He subsequently served as Lieutenant of Languedoc, but on
becoming involved in a feud with King Jean had been imprisoned in
Paris for eighteen months. Back in his domain in 1355, he entered
into a deal of some kind with the Black Prince which spared his
lands during the raid while he remained neutral. The virtual
autonomy of such great lords drained away much of the strength of
France.
The Prince’s company returned to winter quarters at Bordeaux
loaded down with carpets, draperies, jewels, and other spoils if not
with glory. Where was prowess, where was valor, where the skills
and feats of combat that were the warrior’s pride? Robbing and
slaying unarmed civilians called for no courage or strength of arms
and hardly for the knightly virtues of the Round Table and the
Garter. The Prince himself; his principal Gascon ally, the Captal* de
Buch; his closest companion and adviser, Sir John Chandos; the
Earls of Warwick and Salisbury, and at least three others of the
company were charter members of the Order of the Garter,
supposedly exemplars of magnanimity. Whether, when they lay
down to sleep after a day’s carnage, they felt any discrepancy
between the ideal and the practice, no one knows. They left no such
indication. To signify his right to punish, the Prince twice rejected a

good price oered by towns to buy immunity from sack. His letters
express only a sense of satised accomplishment. His raid had
enriched his company, reduced French revenues, and proved to any
wavering Gascons that service under his banner was rewarding. Yet
even Froissart, the uncritical celebrator of knighthood, was moved
to write, “It was an occasion for pity.…” As the war dragged on, the
habituating of armed men to cruelty and destruction as accepted
practice poisoned the 14th century.
Held up by contrary winds and by Charles of Navarre’s sudden
defection, the English force destined for Normandy did not sail until
the end of October, already late for a campaign in the north. Its
commander, Henry, Duke of Lancaster, called the “Father of
Soldiers,” was England’s most distinguished warrior, who had not
missed a battle in his 45 years. He was a veteran of the Scottish
wars, of Sluys, of Calais and all the campaigns in France, and when
his country was quiescent he rode forth in knightly tradition to
carry his sword elsewhere. He had joined the King of Castile in a
crusade against the Moors of Algeciras and journeyed to Prussia to
join the Teutonic Knights in one of their annual “crusades” to
extend Christianity over the lands of Lithuanian heathen.
Inheritor of enormous lands and fortune, Lancaster was in 1351
created the rst English Duke outside the royal family, and
subsequently built the palace of the Savoy as his residence in
London. In 1352, while the truce still held between England and
France, he was the star of a remarkable event in Paris. On returning
from a season in Prussia, he had quarreled with Duke Otto of
Brunswick and accepted his challenge to combat, which was
arranged under French auspices. Given a safe-conduct, escorted by a
noble company to Paris, magnicently entertained by King Jean, the
Duke of Lancaster rode into the lists before a splendid audience of
French nobility, but his mere reputation proved too much for his
opponent. Otto of Brunswick trembled so violently on his war-horse
that he could not put on his helmet or wield his spear and had to be
removed by his friends and retract his challenge. The King covered

the embarrassment to chivalry by a handsome banquet, at which he
reconciled the two principals and oered Lancaster rich presents in
farewell. Refusing them, the Duke accepted only a thorn from the
Saviour’s crown, which on returning home he donated to a
collegiate church he had founded at Leicester.
As religious as he was martial, he wrote in French (still the
language of the English court) a devotional book called the Livre des
sainetes médecines, in which he used allegory to reveal the wounds of
his soul—that is to say, his sins—to Christ, the Divine Physician.
Each part of the body had an allegorical wound and each remedy a
matching religious symbolism. Because the Duke was examining
himself, a 14th century grand seigneur emerges as a real person who
admires the elegance of his long pointed toes in the stirrup, and at
jousts stretches out his legs for the notice of the ladies; who also
reproaches himself for recoiling from the stench of the poor and the
sick, and for extorting money, lands, and other property by
exercising undue inuence on his courts.
In the invasion of France in 1355, Lancaster was joined by King
Edward. Making for Calais instead of Cherbourg, they landed on
November 2, collected a force of 3,000 men-at-arms, 2,000 mounted
archers, and about as many on foot, and set out ostensibly to seek
battle with the King of France while raiding the Pas de Calais,
Artois, and Picardy en route.
The King of France had “solemnly and publicly” issued the
arrièreban or general summons to all men between eighteen and
sixty in May just before the truce ended. Perhaps owing to a poor
response, it was repeated several times during the summer in Paris
and all important places of the realm—“especially in Picardy,”
according to one chronicler. Since a general summons brought in
persons of doubtful military value, the monarchy preferred to
demand the cost of a given number rather than the men themselves,
and tried to x physical standards for those who served and send
the rest home. Sorting them out to assemble a ghting force took
time; doubtless also, owing to recent discontents, not a few nobles
dragged their feet. By November the host that Jean led north to
meet the English was incomplete.

Enguerrand de Coucy VII, aged fteen, was a part of it. Nothing is
reported of what he did, only that he was present among the
“barons of Picardy” in the battalion of Moreau de Fiennes, a future
Marshal of France. He was in distinguished company, with his
guardian, Matthieu de Roye, Master of Crossbowmen, Georey de
Charny, known as the “perfect knight,” and Marshal Arnoul
d’Audrehem. The battalion also included the bourgeois of Paris,
Rouen, and Amiens.
The campaign that was Enguerrand’s rst experience of war was
no stu for heroic legend. The French host was at Amiens on
November 5–7 and had advanced northward to St. Omer by
November 11, bypassing en route the English on the left who were
simultaneously marching south to Hesdin. The armies snied and
circled around each other, each King issuing invitations to the other
to ght—“body to body or force against force,” in the words of
Jean’s challenge—which each managed to decline in ornamental
verbiage. If Jean, as the English chroniclers claimed, feared to seek
pitched battle, Edward was no more eager. Jean’s major military
action was to burn or carry o provisions of the countryside so as to
deprive the English of supply, at the cost of the local populace. Left
to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the
people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but
ravagers.
Jean’s scorched-earth policy forced the English to fall back upon
the coast for lack of food, wine, and beer. For four days they had no
other drink but water, which seemed like starvation in an age that
depended on wine or beer as an essential part of diet. The French
had also taken care with letters and money to stimulate a Scottish
diversion. News of a threat from the Scottish border plus the
prospect of a winter on water caused Edward and Lancaster to re-
embark after a campaign lasting no more than ten days.
Jean now faced the necessity of obtaining from an Assembly of
the Three Estates a subsidy to pay his troops. Summoned by the
King, the Estates of Langued’oil—that is, of northern France—met in
Paris in December. Because, as a result of the tax-exemption of
clergy and nobles, the Third Estate paid most of the taxes, it

controlled the decision on how much aid to grant, and since it could
use its leverage to exact reforms or privileges, the monarchy was
never very happy on these occasions.
The oer made by the Estates of 1355 revealed the wealth of
French resources and the national loyalty beneath the discontents,
and also a profound mistrust of the King’s government. The Estates
agreed to support 30,000 men-at-arms for one year at an estimated
cost of ve million livres on condition that the funds were to be
administered not by the King’s treasury but by a committee of the
Estates themselves which would pay the troops directly. The money
was to be raised by a tax on everyone of all Estates and by a salt tax
as well, at rates which had to be increased in the following year
when the required sum was not produced. The new rates amounted
to a tax of 4 percent on the incomes of the rich, 5 percent on the
middle class, and 10 percent on the lowest taxable class. One result
was a revolt of the “little against the great” in the textile city of
Arras in northern Picardy. Though quickly suppressed, it was a
signal of coming trouble.
Meanwhile, the restless scheming of Charles of Navarre produced
the next explosion. He was trying to turn the eighteen-year-old
Dauphin Charles against his father, and at the same time was
encouraging the Norman lords to resist payment of aids to the King.
In April 1356 the Dauphin, in his capacity as Duke of Normandy,
was entertaining Charles of Navarre and the leading Norman nobles
at a banquet in Rouen when suddenly the doors were broken open
and the King in helmet with many followers, preceded by Marshal
d’Audrehem with drawn sword, burst in. “Let no one move or he is
a dead man!” cried the Marshal. The King seized Navarre, calling
him “Traitor,” at which Navarre’s squire Colin Doublel drew his
dagger in the terrible act of lèse majesté and threatened to plunge it
into the King’s breast. Without inching, Jean ordered his guards to
“seize that boy and his Master too.” He himself laid hold of Jean
d’Harcourt so roughly that he tore his doublet from collar to belt,
accusing him, and others present who had been in the party that
murdered Charles d’Espagne, of treason. In horror, the Dauphin
begged his father not to dishonor him by violence upon his guests,

but was told by the King, “You do not know what I know”; these
were wicked traitors whose crimes had been discovered. Charles of
Navarre pleaded for mercy, saying he was the victim of false
reports, but the King had him arrested with the others while the
remaining guests ed, “climbing over walls in their terror.”
Next morning, Jean d’Harcourt, Colin Doublel, and two other
Norman lords were taken toward the gibbet, in two carts, the
ignominious vehicle used for the condemned, accompanied by the
King in person, dressed in full armor as if expecting attack. His
nerves evidently working on him, Jean suddenly halted the
procession in a eld and ordered the prisoners decapitated on the
spot. He allowed them no priest, for as traitors they were to die
without being confessed, except for Colin Doublel, who was
condemned for raising a weapon against the King rather than for
treason. A substitute executioner was hastily located who took six
blows to sever Harcourt’s head. The four bodies, dragged the rest of
the way to the gibbet, were hung up in chains and their heads stuck
on lances, where they remained for two years. Charles of Navarre
was imprisoned in the Châtelet in Paris and his estates in Normandy
were again conscated by the King.
When Welsh Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry V speaks of the
King’s “cholers and his moods and his displeasures and his
indignations and also being a little intoxicate in his brains,” he
might have been describing Jean le Bon. The King’s principal victim,
Jean d’Harcourt, had three brothers and nine children married into
a network of families of northern France (a daughter subsequently
married Raoul de Coucy, uncle of Enguerrand VII). The King
succeeded in outraging the many connections of his victims without
eliminating his real enemy, Charles of Navarre. Sympathy was
aroused for the prisoner of the Châtelet, and popular songs were
composed in his honor.
The aair of Rouen accomplished just what the King had tried to
thwart—the reopening of Normandy to England. Jean d’Harcourt’s
brother Godefrey, the same who had led Edward III into Normandy
ten years before, and Navarre’s brother Philip appealed for English
help to recover their estates, and when the English landed at

Cherbourg in July 1356, both these lords took the oath of homage
to Edward III as King of France. From Cherbourg the English under
the Duke of Lancaster advanced toward contact with Brittany just at
the time the Black Prince started out from Bordeaux on a new raid
northward toward the heart of France. Events now moved toward
the collision at Poitiers.
With English, Gascons, and reinforcements from home, the Prince
marched north with a force of about 8,000. His object was to link up
with Lancaster and spread damage on the way, taking plunder
rather than towns, fortresses, or territory. Marching, ghting, and
amassing loot, the Prince reached the Loire on or about September 3
and, nding the bridges destroyed, turned westward toward Tours,
where he learned that a large French army was advancing toward
him. He also received word that Lancaster had broken out of
Normandy and was hastening toward a junction. But the Loire lay
between them, and the country was alive with French men-at-arms.
His men were now fatigued from many sharp ghts, sated and
burdened with plunder. After four days’ hesitation which lost him a
head start, the Prince turned southward again with clear intention
to avoid pitched battle and bring his gains safely back to Bordeaux.
In the north Jean had rst moved against Lancaster’s force in
Normandy and temporarily blocked it before turning to face the
threat from the south. He had summoned a great mobilization for
defense of the realm to rendezvous at Chartres in the rst week of
September. Stimulated by the enemy’s presence on the Loire in the
center of France, the nobles responded to the summons, whatever
their sentiments toward the King. They came from Auvergne, Berry,
Burgundy, Lorraine, Hainault, Artois, Vermandois, Picardy, Brittany,
Normandy. “No knight and no squire remained at home,” wrote the
chroniclers; here was gathered “all the ower of France.”
With the King were his four sons, aged fourteen to nineteen; the
new Constable, Gautier de Brienne, who bore the title, Duke of
Athens, from a defunct duchy founded in the crusades; the two
Marshals; 26 counts and dukes, 334 bannerets, and nearly all the

lesser lords. It was the largest French army of the century—a “great
marvel,” wrote an English chronicler, the “equal never seen of
Nobility in arms.” The actual number, given by chroniclers with
individual abandon at anything up to 80,000, has been endlessly
disputed and eventually brought to settle at around 16,000, about
twice the size of the Black Prince’s army.
It had no cohesion. The great seigneurs came at their own time,
many late for the rendezvous, each with his own troop of 50, 100,
or 150 under his own banner, and with his own household and
baggage train and gold and silver vessels and plate for turning into
ready cash when needed. The provisions of the ordinance of 1351
for discipline and order had borne few results. Owing to a quarrel
over renewed taxation, bourgeois support was disaected, causing
the towns to withdraw their contingents. Froissart, on the other
hand, reports that Jean dismissed the bourgeois forces when he
crossed the Loire, “which was madness in him and in those who
advised him.”
With the might of France assembled, Jean was condent he could
force the Prince back into Aquitaine, even back to England. Between
September 8 and 13 the French army crossed the Loire at Orléans,
Blois, and other points and pushed south in pursuit of the Anglo-
Gascons. On September 12 the Black Prince was at Montbazon, ve
miles south of Tours, where he was met by the papal legates who
had been endeavoring to make peace since early in the year. Besides
writing to the Kings of England and France and to leading nobles of
the two countries, urging them to negotiate, the Pope had
dispatched the two cardinals in person to try to halt the hostilities.
The chief of the two was the aristocratic Cardinal Talleyrand de
Périgord, a prelate baldonzoso e superbo (proud and haughty), as
Villani called him. He was a son of the Count of Périgord and of the
beautiful Countess reputed to have been Pope Clement V’s mistress.
At the age of six, perhaps too early to have a religious calling but
not its income, he had been given the Pope’s permission to receive
the clerical tonsure and therefore the right to hold ecclesiastical
beneces. A bishop at twenty-three, a cardinal at thirty, he had held
at one time or another nine English beneces in London, York,

Lincoln, and Canterbury, making him a principal target of English
resentment.
From Cardinal Talleyrand, Prince Edward learned that the King of
France counted on intercepting him and was preparing for pitched
battle on September 14, and that the French army was daily
enlarging as new units arrived. Though the Prince was not anxious
to risk battle against fresh and superior numbers, he nevertheless
rejected Talleyrand’s proposal to negotiate a truce, perhaps because
he was overcondent of being able to elude the enemy. The French
were pushing hard, intending to outank the Prince at Poitiers,
where they would get across the road to Bordeaux and cut o his
retreat. For four days more the armies continued on the march
without making contact, the English barely ten or twelve miles
ahead, the French gradually closing the gap.
On September 17 at a farm called La Chaboterie, three miles west
of Poitiers, a French party led by Raoul de Coucy, Sire de
Montmirail, uncle of Enguerrand VII and reputed one of the bravest
knights of his time, sighted an English reconnaissance unit, and on
its own initiative galloped to the attack. Whether Enguerrand was in
the party is unrecorded, or even whether he was with the host. The
domain of Coucy must certainly have sent its contingent, unless this
was with the forces in Normandy opposing Lancaster. In the clash
that now occurred, Raoul dashed so far forward that he reached the
Prince’s banner-bearer, ghting valiantly. Under the ardor of the
French assault, the Anglo-Gascons reeled back, yet inexplicably,
though they were far outnumbered, they recovered and
overpowered the French. Many were killed and Raoul was captured,
though ransomed soon afterward. Like so much else that happened
at Poitiers, the outcome at La Chaboterie is dicult to explain.
Greedy for ransoms from the skirmish, the Anglo-Gascons pursued
with such vigor that they were drawn three leagues from the eld,
with the result that the Prince, in order to rally and reassemble his
forces, had to halt where he was and camp for the night though
suering greatly from lack of water.
On the following morning, Sunday, September 18, as the Prince’s
weary company resumed march just below Poitiers, his scouts from

a crest of land saw a glitter of armor and the utter of a thousand
pennants as the French main body came into view. Knowing he was
overtaken and battle now unavoidable, the Prince drew up his
forces in the most favorable site he could nd, on a wooded slope
edged by vineyards and hedges and by a stream meandering
through marshy land. Beyond the stream was a wide eld traversed
by a narrow road. The place was about two miles southeast of
Poitiers.
Condent of victory in his superior strength, King Jean was held
back from attack by Cardinal Talleyrand, who arrived with a great
company of clerics to beg him to keep Sunday’s “Truce of God” until
next morning while allowing the Cardinal another chance to
mediate. At a war council in the King’s pavilion of scarlet silk,
Marshal d’Audrehem and others ardent for battle, and conscious of
the threat of the Duke of Lancaster at their rear, urged no delay.
Against their advice, the King fatally agreed to the Cardinal’s plea
for delay. A proposal by Georey de Charny for an arranged combat
of 100 champions on each side was rejected by his companions lest
it exclude too many from combat, glory, and ransoms. If either
immediate battle or Charny’s proposal had been adopted, the
ultimate outcome might have been dierent.
When Cardinal Talleyrand hastened back to the English camp, he
found the Prince was now amenable to, even anxious for, any
arrangement that would get him out of danger with honor and
spoils intact. Edward oered to restore free of ransom all prisoners
he had taken during the two campaigns and all places he had
occupied, and to agree to non-belligerency for seven years, during
which he would pledge not to take up arms against the King of
France. He even oered, according to the Chronique des Quatre
Premiers Valois, to yield Calais and Guînes, though he certainly
lacked the authority for such a surrender. His extraordinary
concessions indicate his sense of a desperate situation and the
realization that he could be starved out if the French chose to
surround and invest him. Or, knowing that so inglorious a choice by
the French was unlikely, he may have been playing for time to
complete preparation of his archers’ positions. This his men were

already engaged in doing, and throughout the day of parleys they
continued entrenching and setting up palisades.
King Jean agreed to consider the proposal. Cardinal Talleyrand
and his clerics hurried back and forth on their mules, and the
Prince’s chief knights came under safe-conduct to parley in person.
Hardly a battle of the endless war, except in Brittany, was not
preceded by eorts to stop it that never succeeded. Arrogant in his
condence of victory, Jean accepted the oer on condition that the
Prince of Wales would surrender himself and 100 of his knights as
prisoners of the King of France. Such humiliation the Prince
resolutely refused, having meanwhile improved his position among
the woods and behind hedges. While Talleyrand still begged the
King for the love of Christ to agree at least to a truce until
Christmas, the day of parleys was over. The French council of war
reconvened to determine a plan of attack.
Marshal Clermont advised blockade, the very action the Prince
had feared. Rather than the folly of attacking the English in their
protected position, he said the French should encamp around them
and when they had no more food “they would depart from that
place.” This was the obvious and sensible course to adopt, but the
dictates of chivalry forbade it. Met with scorn and erce dispute by
Marshal d’Audrehem, Clermont’s proposal was rejected. Three
knights who had reconnoitered the English lines came in to report
that the only access to the enemy was a narrow passage permitting
no more than four abreast to ride through. On the advice of Sir
William Douglas, a Scot experienced against the English who was
acting as the King’s chief of tactics, the critical decision was taken
for the main body to attack on foot. But rather than forgo altogether
the cavalry charge of heavy armor, it was decided that the initial
breakthrough of the archers’ lines should be carried out by a task
force of 300 of the elite of the army mounted on the strongest and
swiftest war-horses. All three military chiefs, the Constable and both
Marshals, were recklessly assigned to this body.
At sunrise on Monday, September 19, in bustle and clamor of
arms with trumpets sounding, the French host was drawn up behind
the mounted spearhead in the usual three battalions. They were

deployed one behind the other, presumably for successive shocks,
but precluded by this position from aiding one another on the ank.
The nineteen-year-old Dauphin, who had never fought in war
before, was nominal commander of the rst battalion; Philippe
d’Orléans, brother of the King, aged twenty and equally a novice,
commanded the second; the King himself, the third. He was
accompanied by a personal guard of nineteen others dressed exactly
like him in black armor and white surcoat marked with eur-de-lys.
This was a prudent if not exactly knightly precaution, since in a
battle in which a sovereign engaged, the enemy would do its utmost
to capture him.
“On foot! On foot!” ordered Jean, and “he put himself on foot
before all.” It has been said that he took the decision to dismount in
order to reduce the opportunity among his disunited forces for
individual action or ight. Modern critics—for the debate has
continued-have called it “suicidal folly”; others have considered it
the only sensible and feasible decision because cavalry could not
deploy en masse owing to the marshes, hedges, and ditches.
The knights dismounted, removed spurs, cut o the long pointed
toes of their poulaines, and shortened their lances to ve feet. The
Oriamme, fork-tongued scarlet banner of the Kings of France, was
awarded to Georey de Charny, “the perfect knight,” to carry.
Legend derived the banner from Charlemagne, who was said to have
carried it to the Holy Land in response to an angel’s prophecy that a
knight armed with a golden lance from whose tip ames of “great
marvel” burned would deliver the land from the Saracens.
Embroidered with golden ames that gave it its name, the banner
had been adopted by the monarchy from the Abbey of St. Denis
along with the battle cry “Montjoie-St. Denis!” As the signal for
advance or rally, the war cry signied allegiance to a particular
lord. On that morning the King announced the royal cry as the cry
for all. “You have cursed the English,” he cried to the assembled
ranks of chivalry, “and longed to measure swords with them. Behold
them in your presence! Remember the wrongs they have done you
and revenge yourselves for the losses and suerings they have

inicted on France. I promise you we shall do battle with them, and
God be with us!”
The Prince of Wales deployed two battalions in front for mutual
support and one behind, with the archers in saw-tooth formation
divided among the three. The four Earls—Warwick and Oxford,
Suolk and Salisbury—commanded the two front divisions, the
Prince and Chandos the rear, with a body of 400 reserves at their
side. The English had the advantage of terrain and a far greater
advantage in being a coherent body, experienced together in two
campaigns, professionally trained, and based on better management
and organization. For overseas expeditions the English had to plan
carefully and recruit selectively the ablest and strongest ghting
material.
Yet even now, perhaps because of divided opinion among his
advisors, the Prince essayed a movement to get away toward the
road to Bordeaux. “For on that day,” in the words of Chandos
Herald, “he did not wish for combat, I tell you true, but wished
without fail to avoid battle entirely.” The movement of baggage
wagons behind the hill, revealed by the uttering pennants of their
advance guard, was seen by Marshal d’Audrehem, who shouted,
“Ha! Pursue! Charge, ere the English are lost to us!” The more sober
Clermont still advised a surrounding action, precipitating a furious
quarrel between the two Marshals on the very brink of battle.
Audrehem accused his fellow of being “afraid to look on them” and
of causing delay that would lose the day, to which Clermont replied
with suitable insult. “Ha, Maréchal, you are not so bold but that
your horse’s nose will nd itself in my horse’s ass!” In this disunity
the charge of the mounted spearhead was launched.
Warned of the assault, the Prince had halted the initial departure,
reassembled, and in a ery oration called upon his knights to ght
for their King’s claim to the French crown, for the great honor of
victory, for rich spoils and eternal fame. He told them to trust in
God and obey commands.
Attacking from the ank, Audrehem’s squadron was caught and
crushed under the piercing arrows of the archers, while Clermont,
joined by the Constable, charged in the frontal attack he so

mistrusted and was beaten back under ights of arrows so thick they
darkened the air. Shooting from sheltered positions protected by
dismounted knights and foot soldiers, the archers, at the express
order of the Earl of Oxford, aimed for the horses’ unarmored rumps.
Stumbling and falling, the horses went down under their riders or
reared back among those who followed, “making great slaughter
upon their own masters.” It was the frenzy of Crécy over again.
Fallen knights could not raise their horses or rise themselves. In the
melee that followed, amid call of trumpets, shouted battle cries, and
screams of wounded men and horses, both Clermont and the
Constable were killed, Audrehem was captured, and the greater part
of the picked knights killed or taken prisoner.
Already the Dauphin’s battalion was advancing on foot into the
havoc. With Charles in the front lines were his two brothers,
seventeen-year-old Louis, Duc d’Anjou, and sixteen-year-old Jean,
future Duc de Berry. Tangled in the confusion of riderless horses and
raging combat, many of the battalion fought on savagely, hand to
hand, stabbing with shortened lances and hacking with battle-ax
and sword. But with no hardened leader in command, only a boy
witnessing debacle, the unit began to fall back. A shout of triumph
from enemy throats signaled seizure of the Dauphin’s standard.
Whether on order of the King to save his sons, as later claimed, or at
the decision of the four lords appointed as the princes’ guardians,
the greater part of the battalion withdrew from the eld, falling
back upon and infecting with failure the Duc d’Orléans’ battalion.
Instead of coming in with fresh force to give the hard-pressed
English no pause, which at this stage might well have turned the
tide, Orléans’ battalion, swept up in the retreat, ed without striking
a blow, retrieved its waiting horses, and galloped for the city.
“Advance,” cried the King upon this successive disaster, “for I will
recover the day or die on the eld!” With Oriamme ying and his
youngest son, fourteen-year-old Philip, future Duke of Burgundy, at
his father’s side, this largest of the three battalions, awkward on foot
in their iron cocoons, marched upon the bloody eld. “Alack! We
are undone!” cried an English knight, seeing them come. “You lie,
miserable coward,” stormed the Prince, “if you so blaspheme as to

say that I, alive, may be conquered!” Each side fell upon the other
with the strength and ferocity of desperation. Although a battle’s
outcome, it was said, could be told by the time the sixth arrow was
loosed, now when the English archers had emptied their sheaves the
issue wavered. In the pause before the new French assault, the
archers had retrieved arrows from the wounds and dead bodies of
the fallen; others now hurled stones and fought with knives. Had the
third French assault been mounted, it is possible that at this stage,
against a battered opponent, it might have prevailed.
The battle entered its seventh hour, a tossing mass of separate
groups hammering each other, oblivious of any formation, except
for the Prince and Chandos still holding command with the reserves
on the hilltop. Pointing to where the Oriamme ew, Chandos
advised the Prince to attack the King’s unit, for, he said, “Valor will
not allow him to ee; he will fall into our power and victory will be
ours.” In what proved the decisive maneuver, the Prince ordered his
D’Artagnesque ally, the Captal de Buch, to lead a small mounted
force in attack upon the French rear while, with the mounted
reserves and the unwounded from his own battalion, he summoned
the army’s last strength for a frontal oensive. “Sirs, behold me
here! For God’s mercy, think on striking! Advance, Banner, in the
name of God and St. George!”
His trumpets sounded, and their echo, thrown back by the stone
walls of Poitiers, rang through the woods “so that you would think
the hills had called out to the valleys and that it had thundered in
the clouds.” The English charge, in whole or in part on horseback,
rushed down upon the King’s unit “like the wild boar of Cornwall.”
The battle reached climactic fury “and none so hardy” wrote
Chandos Herald, “whose heart was not dismayed.” “Beware, Father,
to the right! Ware, to the left!” Philip cried as the blows descended.
Knights grappled in personal combat, “each thinking of his own
honor.” Attacked by the Prince’s charge in front and the Captal’s
horsemen from the rear, the French fought in ferocious despair.
Bleeding from multiple wounds, Georey de Charny was cut down
and killed still holding the Oriamme. The King’s guard,
surrounding him in a mighty wedge, tottered under the assault.

“Some, eviscerated, tread on their own entrails, others vomit forth
their teeth, some still standing have their arms cut o. The dying
roll about in the blood of strangers, the fallen bodies groan, and the
proud spirits, abandoning their inert bodies, moan horribly.” The
slain piled up around the ailing battle-ax of the King, who with his
helmet knocked o was bleeding from two wounds on his face.
“Yield, yield,” cried voices, “or you are a dead man!” In the midst of
hoarse shouts and erce contention to seize him, a French exile,
Denis de Morbecque, banished for manslaughter and now serving
the English, pressed forward and said, “Sire, I am a knight of Artois.
Yield yourself to me and I will lead you to the Prince of Wales.”
King Jean handed him his glove and surrendered.
With the loss of the King, the remaining French forces
disintegrated, those who could ying for the gates of Poitiers to
escape capture. English and Gascons of all ranks pursued wildly,
greed overmastering exhaustion, and scrambled for prisoners under
the very walls of the city. Some of the French turned in ight and
captured their pursuers.
The defeat swept France of its leadership. In addition to the King,
the Constable and both Marshals, and the bearer of the Oriamme,
who were either dead or taken, the victors captured one ghting
archbishop, 13 counts, 5 viscounts, 21 barons and bannerets, and
some 2,000 knights, squires, and men-at-arms of the gentry. Too
many to be taken back, most were released on a pledge to bring
their ransoms to Bordeaux before Christmas.
The number of killed, a dierent gure in every account, was at
least several thousand, of whom 2,426 were of the nobility. The fact
that they equaled or outnumbered the captured was evidence of
valiant ghting, but, unfortunately for France, the living who ed
made a greater impression than the dead who fought. The Grand
Chronique admits openly that battalions “ed shamefully and
cravenly,” and the Chronique Normande somberly concludes, “The
mortality of this battle was not so great as the shame.”

That was the great debris of Poitiers. Citizens watching from the
city walls witnessed inglorious retirement and hectic ight, and
their report spread throughout France. The retreat of Orléans’
battalion which lost the day is hardly explicable except by the
disaected mood of nobles antagonized by the King. Certainly many
were present that day who would not have grieved at misfortune to
the monarchy, and it would have taken the shouts of only a few to
induce panic. Whatever the cause, the eect was to deepen and
spread mistrust of the noble estate and loosen condence in the
ordained structure of society.
Popular sentiment showed itself at once against lords returning to
raise their ransoms. They were so “hated and blamed by the
commoners,” reports Froissart, that they had diculty in gaining
admittance to the towns and sometimes even to their own estates.
Peasants of a village in Normandy belonging to the Sire de Ferté-
Fresnel, seeing their seigneur come riding through with only a
squire and a valet and without his sword, raised the cry, “Here is
one of the traitors who ed from the battle!” They rushed upon the
three riders, pulled the lord from his horse, and beat him up. He
returned a few days later, better armed, to take vengeance, killing
one villager in the process. Though this small outburst was quickly
crushed, it was an omen. Many seigneurs returned to face gibes or
sudden hostility and had trouble raising the traditional aid for the
lord’s ransom. To nd the funds, many were forced to sell all their
furnishings or free their serfs for payment. A residue of ruined
knights was a by-product of Poitiers.
The cry of “Traitor!” was not a local voice only, but a bewildered
people’s explanation of the inexplicable. It was the eternal cry of
conspiracy, of stab in the back. How else could the great King of
France have been taken and the great host of French chivalry
defeated by a handful of “archers and brigands” except by betrayal?
A contemporary polemic in verse called “Complaint of the Battle of
Poitiers” explicitly charges,
The very great treason that they long time concealed
Was in the said host very clearly revealed.

The author, an unknown cleric, accuses certain persons of having by
“their cupidity sold secrets of the Royal Council to the English” and,
on being discovered and “kicked out of the Council by the King,” of
conspiring to destroy him and his children. The ight of these false
men, “treacherous, disloyal, infamous and perjured,” was a planned
betrayal; in them the nobility was dishonored and France too. They
have denied God; they are men of pride, greed and haughty
manners,
Of bombast and vainglory and dishonest clothes,
With golden belts and plumes on their heads
And the long beard of goats, a thing for beasts.
They deafen you like thunder and tempest.
The beard complained of, originally a mark of penitence, had
lately been worn in narrow forked style as a worldy fashion and
now became an object of satire linked with running away.
The “Complaint” has only praise for Jean II, who fought to the
end with his little son beside him. In public opinion he became a
hero. However inept as sovereign and captain, his personal valor,
poignantly emphasized by the “little son,” gloried him in the eyes
of his subjects and gave France a focus for the recovery of honor.
The “Complaint” hopes that God will send “good men of great
power” to avenge the defeat and bring back the King, and concludes
signicantly:
If he is well advised, he will not forget
To lead Jaque Bonhomme and all his great company
Who do not run from war to save their lives!
After the citizens of Poitiers had buried the bodies outside, the
Mayor proclaimed mourning for the captured King and forbade
celebration of any feast day or festival. In Languedoc the Estates
General prohibited for the space of a year, so long as the King was
not delivered, the wearing of gold, silver, or pearls, ornamented or
scalloped robes and hats, and entertainment by minstrels and
jongleurs. The Dauphin and his brothers, though judged unfavorably

in comparison with young Philip, were not included in the blame of
the nobles. Charles on his return to Paris “was received with honor
by the people, grief-stricken by the capture of his father the King.”
They felt, according to Jean de Venette, that somehow he would
bring about the King’s release “and the whole country of France
would be saved.”
Why the ight? Why the defeat? To Villani in Italy the
extraordinary event seemed “unbelievable”; Petrarch, learning about
it in Milan on return from a journey, was no less stunned; the
English themselves thought their victory a miracle, and succeeding
generations have found it hard to fathom. Militarily, French
numerical superiority was nullied by a failure of command. The
2,000 Genoese crossbowmen, according to some reports, were not
even used, although others report the contrary. The comparative
ineectiveness of French archery throughout the century is a puzzle.
Towns and villages of France maintained companies of archers who
were encouraged by special privileges, and men of the Beauvaisis,
adjoining Picardy, considered themselves in individual skill the best
in the world. Yet they were never properly combined in action with
knights and men-at-arms, because French chivalry scorned to share
its dominance of the eld with commoners.
Separatism in Normandy and Brittany, failure to resist the Black
Prince’s raid in Languedoc, and the intrigues and betrayals of
Charles of Navarre were aspects of the disunity that lost the Battle
of Poitiers. The right of independent withdrawal, which the Order of
the Star and the ordinance of 1351 had tried to suppress, had not
been yielded by the nobles in their own minds. The defeat at
Poitiers was a pyrrhic triumph of baronial independence.
It was also, on the English side, a victory of generalship that made
up for fatigue and inferior numbers. The Prince could give orders
that were obeyed and, with moral leadership more secure than
Jean’s, and battalion chiefs on whom he could rely, could control
what happened. He kept himself where he could view the battle and
direct movements, he was served by toughened, experienced
soldiers, and he had two essentials for winning: no possibility of
retreat and a will that goaded men to the last ounce of ght. As a

commander, in Froissart’s words, he was “courageous and cruel as a
lion.”
Spent by combat and eager to bring his royal prize out of reach of
any rescue attempt, the Prince made no further eort toward a
juncture with Lancaster, but turned south at once for Bordeaux,
dragging added baggage wagons lled with luxurious ttings
including furred mantles, jewels, and illuminated books from the
French camp. Released by the Dauphin after the defeat, the French
nobles scattered to protect their own domains; none rallied to
attempt a rescue of the King along the 150-mile march to Bordeaux.
The Cardinals followed there to renew pressure for peace, and while
terms of a settlement were under negotiation, English and Gascons
engaged in a massive commerce of buying and selling prisoners and
shares in ransoms with heated disputes over who had captured
whom, and no little ill-will generated in the process. Complaints
were heard that the archers had killed too many who might have
been held for ransom. When the Prince proposed to take the King of
France to England as a prisoner, the Gascons angrily claimed a share
in his capture and had to be appeased by a payment of 100,000
orins, raised from a rst oer of 60,000 they had spurned.
With the French King in their hands, the English were in a
position to drive a crushing bargain. But though the French
negotiators were prisoners themselves and the Dauphin at home was
beleaguered by events in Paris, the French balked at the hard terms
proposed. The winter passed with no agreement reached except for
another truce to last two years. In May 1357, seven months after the
battle, the Black Prince took King Jean with his son and other noble
prisoners back to London, while in the aftermath of defeat the Third
Estate grasped for control in Paris.

It was this deal, negotiated through England’s envoy in Avignon, that was
supposed to have earned him the title of Charles the Bad, although this is
disputed by others who say it had been conferred by his Spanish subjects
from the time he was eighteen. In fact the title was not contemporary and
does not appear in the chronicles until the 16th century.

His title derived from the Latin capitalis, meaning chieftain.

Chapter 7

L
Decapitated France: The Bourgeois Rising and
the Jacquerie
ong exasperated by the anarchy of royal nance and the
venality of royal ministers, the Third Estate of Paris seized
upon the decapitation of the monarchy to try to impose some
form of constitutional control. The summoning of an Estates
General to grant money for defense in the crisis provided their
opportunity. As soon as the 800 delegates could meet in Paris in
October, the inexperienced Dauphin, humiliated and frightened by
the defeat at Poitiers, had to report the battle’s shameful outcome
and ask the Estates for aids to deliver the King and defend the
realm. The bourgeois, chief creditors of the state, made up half the
delegates and listened coldly while King Jean’s Chancellor, Pierre de
la Forêt, supported the request. After voting themselves into a
standing Committee of Eighty, including nobles and clergy, and
allowing the rest gratefully to go home, the Estates prepared to
confront the Dauphin with their demands. They asked to speak to
him privately, believing that without his councillors he would be
more easily cowed.
The major gure among them, who was to be the moving spirit of
the coming eruption, was the Provost of Merchants, Etienne Marcel,
a rich draper whose post was equivalent to that of Mayor of Paris.
He had been the spokesman when the Estates of 1355 made
manifest their mistrust of the royal government. Marcel represented
the mercantile magnates of the Third Estate, the producers and
businessmen of medieval society who over the last 200 years had
achieved an inuence, in practice if not in status, equal to that of
the great prelates and nobles.

His rst demand on behalf of the Estates was dismissal of the
seven most notoriously venal of the royal councillors whose
property was to be conscated and who were to be barred forever
from holding public oce. In their place a Council of Twenty-eight,
consisting of twelve nobles, twelve bourgeois, and four clerics, was
to be appointed by the Estates, and on that understanding the
Estates agreed to grant certain taxes in aid of the war. A nal
condition, which they would have done better to avoid, was the
release from prison of Charles of Navarre.
They wanted him because his potential for trouble would put
pressure on the Dauphin and because Navarre had an ally among
them, a plotter like himself, who was the gray eminence of the
reform movement. This was Robert le Coq, Bishop of Laon, a cleric
of bourgeois origin and “dangerous” eloquence who through the
avenue of the law had risen to favor and high oce as King’s
Advocate under Philip VI and to the Royal Council under Jean II. He
owned a library, large for its time, of 76 books, of which 48 dealt
with civil and canon law, reecting his concern with problems of
government, and seven were collections of sermons used for models
of the oratorical art. Style and language were a medieval
preoccupation of which Le Coq made himself a master. Appointed
Bishop of Laon, he had stage-managed the exquisite reconciliations
of Jean II and Charles of Navarre, whose ambitions he saw as the
chariot of his own. He wanted to be Chancellor and hated both the
King for not giving him the oce and the existing Chancellor for
having it.
The Dauphin Charles, weakling though he seemed, possessed
beneath his sickly exterior a hard core of resistance and a native
intelligence, which came to his aid in adversity. Pale and thin,
though not yet subject to the maladies that were later to be his
portion, he had small, sharp eyes, thin lips, a long, thin nose, and an
ill-proportioned body. He was anything but a libertine in
appearance, although the two bastard sons credited to him by
contemporaries must have been fathered, judging by their age,
when he was fteen or sixteen. Having neither taste nor capacity for
military pursuits, he exercised his mind instead, which was useful

for rulership, if not characteristic of the Valois. In fact there was
gossip about his mother (who had been sixteen when she married
Jean at thirteen) which suggested that her eldest son may not have
been a Valois. He certainly resembled Jean in no way whatever.
For the moment, left to defend a crown amid the wreckage,
Charles on the advice of his father’s councillors rejected the Estates’
demands and ordered them to dismiss. At the same time he removed
himself from Paris as a precaution. Refusing to disperse, the
standing committee assembled the day after he left, in November
1356, and listened to an inammatory address by Robert le Coq
denouncing royal misrule and specifying enlarged demands for
reform. “Shame to him who speaks not forth,” he cried, “for never
was the time so good as now!”
The bid to limit the monarchy was now in the open. It might have
been the French Runnymede if the challengers had been as cohesive
as the English barons of 1215, but they were soon to split into
factions.
The upper level of the Third Estate, made up of merchants,
manufacturers, lawyers, oce-holders, and purveyors to the crown,
had nothing left in common with its working-class base except the
fact of being non-noble. To overcome that barrier was every
bourgeois magnate’s aim. While climbing toward ennoblement and
a country estate, he emulated the clothes, customs, and values of the
nobles and on arriving shared their tax exemption—no small
benet. Etienne Marcel had an uncle who had paid the highest tax
in Paris in 1313 and whose son bought a patent of nobility for 500
livres. Marcel’s father- and brother-in-law, Pierre and Martin des
Essars, starting from bourgeois origins in Rouen, had become
enriched and ennobled in the service of Philip the Fair and Philip
VI. As the crown’s agents, they and their kind provisioned the royal
households, commissioned their tapestries and books, purchased
their jewels, fabrics, and works of art, served as their condants and
moneylenders, and held lucrative oce as treasurers and tax-
collectors. Pierre was able to give his daughter Marguerite, when
she married Marcel, a princely dowry of 3,000 écus.

Nobles and clergy resented the royal favor shown and the
opulence allowed to ocials chosen from outside their ranks.
Especially they hated the nance ocers, “who travel in pomp and
make fortunes greater than the dukes and marry their daughters to
nobles and buy up the lands of poor knights whom they have
cheated and impoverished … and appoint their own kind to oces
whose numbers grow from day to day and whose salaries keep
pace.”
Between the ocial class and the mercantile bourgeois like
Marcel, no love was lost, though they shared the enterprises of
capitalism. When capitalism became feasible through the techniques
of banking and credit, it became respectable. The theory of a non-
acquisitive society faded, and accumulation of surplus wealth lost its
odium—indeed, became enviable. In Renart le Contrefait, a satire of
the time, the wealthy bourgeois enjoy the best estate of all: “They
live in a noble manner, wear lordly garments, have falcons and
sparrow hawks, ne palfreys and ne chargers. When the vassals
must go to join the host, the bourgeois rest in their beds; when the
vassals go to be massacred in battle, the bourgeois picnic by the
river.”
Chosen by the leading citizens, the Provost of Merchants and his
fellow magistrates administered all the usual municipal functions
and assigned daily duty to the police force, which was manned by
the obligatory service of citizens in units of ten, forty, and fty.
Assisted by four deputies and a council of 24 clerics and laymen, the
Provost was supposed to be on duty from seven A.M. every day
except holy days. His seat was the Châtelet, which was also the city
prison and was located on the right bank at the entrance to the
Grand Pont, the only bridge leading over to the Ile de la Cité.
Nearby the Châtelet was the City Hall on a large open square called
the Place de Grève, where the unemployed came to be hired.
The city Marcel governed covered an area, by present landmarks,
from approximately the Grands Boulevards on the right bank to the
Luxembourg Gardens on the left, and east to west from the Bastille
to the Tuileries. Everything beyond these boundaries was faubourg

or countryside. The center of Paris was the Ile de la Cité in the
middle of the Seine, on which stood the Cathedral of Notre Dame,
the Hôtel Dieu or public hospital, and the royal palace built by St.
Louis. The right bank, which had expanded beyond the old walls,
was the side of commerce, industry, public markets, luxury trades,
and wealthy residences, while the left bank, much smaller in
populated area, was dominated by the University. According to a
tax survey of the year 1292, the city at that time had 352 streets,
eleven crossroads, ten squares, fteen churches, and 15,000
taxpayers. Fifty years later, in Marcel’s day, its total population after
the Black Death was probably around 75,000.
Main streets were paved and wide enough to accommodate two
carts or carriages, while the rest of the streets were narrow, muddy,
and malodorous with a gutter running down the middle. For the
average citizen the rule for elimination was “all in the street,” and
in lower-class quarters a pile of ordure usually lay at every doorway.
Householders were supposed to carry the deposits to disposal pits
and were reminded by repeated ordinances to pave and sweep their
doorsteps.
Trac jams blocked the narrow streets when pack mules with
baskets hanging on either side met street vendors with their trays or
porters bent under loads of wood and charcoal. Tavern signs on long
iron poles further crowded the streets. Shop signs were gargantuan,
the better to overwhelm customers, since shopkeepers were
forbidden to call to buyers until after they had left the neighboring
shop. A tooth-puller was represented by a tooth the size of an
armchair, a glover by a glove with each nger big enough to hold a
baby.
The noise of signs rattling in the wind competed with the cries of
street vendors, the shouts of muleteers, the clatter of horses, and the
announcements of public criers. Paris had six Master Criers
appointed by the Provost, each with a number of assistants who
were sent out to the crossroads and squares of the various quarters
to announce ocial decrees, taxes, fairs and ceremonies, houses for
sale, missing children, marriages, funerals, births, and baptisms.
When the King’s vintage was ready for sale, all the taverns had to

close while public criers twice a day cried the royal wine. When
deaths were announced, the criers rang bells as they moved along,
calling in solemn tones, “Wake, you sleepers, pray God to forgive
your trespasses; the dead cannot cry; pray for their souls as the bell
sounds in these streets.” Stray dogs howled to hear them.
Each trade occupied its own quarter—butchers and tanners
around the Châtelet, money-changers, goldsmiths, and drapers on
the Grand Pont, scribes, illuminators, and parchment- and ink-
sellers on the left bank around the University. In the open shops
worked bakers, soap-makers, shmongers, hatters, cabinet-makers,
potters, embroiderers, launderers, furriers, blacksmiths, barbers,
apothecaries, and the myriad sub-specialties of the clothing and
metal trades. Below the artisan class were day laborers, porters, and
domestics. Named for their job or place of origin or some personal
trait, they might be called Robert le Gros (the Fat), Raoul le Picard
(of Picardy), Isabeau d’Outre-mer (from overseas), and Gautier
Hors-du-sens (Crazy Walter).
In each quarter were public baths, providing either steam or hot
water. A total of 26 were listed in the survey of 1292. Though
considered dangerous to morality, especially of women, they were
recognized as a contribution to cleanliness which the city took pains
to keep from closing during a bad winter when fuel was costly. They
were forbidden to admit prostitutes, vagabonds, lepers, or men of
bad repute, or to open before dawn because of perils in the streets at
night, but at daybreak the crier’s voice was heard,
Calling to you to bathe, Messire,
And steam yourself without delay.
Our water’s hot and that’s no lie.
As a capital city with a great university, Paris was host to a
turbulent horde of students from all over Europe. They had
privileged status not subject to local justice but only to the King,
with the result that their crimes and disorders went largely
unpunished. They lived miserably, overcharged for dirty rooms in
dark neighborhoods. They sat on stools in cold lecture halls lit only

by two candles and were perennially complained of for debauchery,
rape, robbery, and “all other enormities hateful to God.”
Though Oxford was growing as a center of intellectual interest,
the University of Paris was still the theological arbiter of Europe,
and the libraries of its separate faculties, some numbering up to a
thousand volumes, augmented its glory. Added to these were the
ne library of Notre Dame and no less than 28 booksellers, not
counting open-air bookstalls. Here were “abundant orchards of all
manner of books,” wrote an enraptured English visitor; “what a
mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts when we visited
Paris, the paradise of the world!”
Water was supplied to the city at public fountains fed by
aqueducts leading from the hills northeast of Paris. Windmills lled
the faubourgs, where houses had room for gardens and vineyards,
and abbeys stood amid cultivated elds. Produce entered the city
mainly by riverboat to be laid out on market tables or sold from the
trays of vendors. Beggars sat by church doors asking for alms,
mendicant friars begged bread for their orders or for the poor in
prison, jongleurs performed stunts and magic in the plazas and
recited satiric tales and narrative ballads of adventure in Saracen
lands. Streets were bright with colored clothes. Crimson, green, and
particolored, being the most expensive, were reserved for nobles,
prelates, and magnates. The clergy could wear color as long as their
gowns were long and buttoned. At sundown the curfew bell rang for
closing time, work ceased, shops were shuttered, silence succeeded
bustle. At eight o’clock, when the Angelus bell signaled bedtime, the
city was in darkness. Only the crossroads were lit by ickering
candle or lamp placed in a niche holding a statue of Notre Dame or
the patron saint of the quarter.
On Sundays all business was closed, everyone went to church, and
afterward working people gathered in the taverns while the
bourgeois promenaded in the faubourgs. On holidays it was a Paris
custom to dine at a table set outside the front door. Houses were the
characteristic high narrow urban type built side by side, sometimes
with a courtyard between the front half and the back. They were
half-timbered, with the spaces lled by clay or stone and each story

cantilevered over the one below. The hôtels of nobles and magnates
kept some elements of the fortied castle with conical towers and
high walls. As a concession to urban life they had large glass-paned
windows opening onto courtyards, and belvederes with many
ornamental pinnacles on the roofs from which a watch could be
maintained on all sides. The owner was made known by his coat-of-
arms sculpted over the doorway. Streets had no inscribed names, so
that people had to search for hours to nd the place they wanted.
Indoors the noble residences were decorated with murals and
tapestries, but furniture was meager. Beds, which served for sitting
as well as sleeping, were the most important item. Chairs were few;
even kings and popes received ambassadors sitting on beds
furnished with elaborate curtains and spreads; otherwise, people sat
on benches. Torches in wall sconces lit the rooms, and massive
replaces were built into the walls. These wall chimneys “in the
French fashion,” as they were called in Italy, were the greatest
luxury of middle-class homes. The only other warmth came from the
oven and cooking re and warming pans in bed at night. Like
sanitation, heating was an arrangement that the age seems
technologically equipped to have handled better than it did, were it
not that man is as irrational about his comfort as about other
activities. Fur coverlets, fur-lined clothes, or separate fur linings
worn under tunics and robes substituted for active sources of heat.
The furs of otter, cat, miniver, squirrel, and fox were less expensive
than heavy wool cloth; ermine and marten adorned the rich.
Floors were strewn in summer with fragrant herbs and grasses
and at other times by rushes or straw changed four times a year, or
once a year in poorer homes, by which time it was lled with eas
and rank with dog droppings and refuse. A well-o merchant
scattered violets and other owers on his oor before a dinner party
and decorated his walls and table with fresh greens bought in the
market at early morning.
Rooms were few, servants slept where they could, privacy was
nonexistent, which may have increased irritability. Whether it
hampered or facilitated seduction is an open question. The two
Cambridge students in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale were conveniently

enabled to enjoy the favors of the Miller’s wife and daughter
because they were put to bed in the same room with the family.
Even in greater homes guests slept in the same room with host and
hostess.
Such was the Third Estate of Paris, from the poorest workman to
the richest magnate, whom Marcel tried to mobilize in his struggle
against the Dauphin. To make him submit, the Provost began to use
the threat of strikes and popular violence. When the Dauphin tried
to raise money by another devaluation of the coinage, arousing the
wrath of Paris, “the Provost ordered all guilds and trades throughout
the city to stop work and everyone to arm.” Forced to cancel the
edicts and left without funds, the Dauphin had no recourse but to
recall the Estates and return to Paris to meet with them.
At this session, lasting a month from February to March 1357, all
the proposed reforms, formulated in writing, were presented in a
Grand Ordinance of 61 articles, the Magna Carta of the Third Estate.
Written in French rather than Latin as if to emphasize a new voice,
the ordinance set forth an ideal of “Good Government” as if its
framers were trying to implement Lorenzetti’s delectable vision
under that name painted a few years earlier in Siena. In the painted
city, citizens in gowns of gentle colors go harmoniously about their
business, and mounted men-at-arms pass them by in mutual
tolerance and benignity. In a distraught time, the Grand Ordinance
was grasping for the same order and decency.
The framers had devised not a grand new scheme of government
but rather a set of corrections of existing abuses into which were
tossed three political fundamentals. These provided that the
monarchy could levy no tax not voted by the Estates, that the
Estates General had the right to assemble periodically at their own
volition, and that a Grand Council of Thirty-six, twelve from each
estate, was to be elected by the Estates to advise the crown.
The purge of King Jean’s councillors was rearmed and the
members of the new Grand Council “were abjured to forgo the habit
of their predecessors of coming late to work and working very

little.” All ocials were to be at work “every day at sunrise”; they
were to be well paid, but lose their pay if they failed to appear early
in the morning. The currency was not to be altered without the
consent of the Estates, royal and princely expenditures were to be
reduced, judicial cases in Parlement were to be speeded up,
provincial bailis were not to hold two oces or engage in
commerce, the summons to military service was to be issued only
under specic conditions, nobles were not to leave the country
without permission, and their private wars were sternly forbidden.
Justice and charity for the poor were to be expedited, their property
was not to be conscated without just price, and their vehicles for
never more than one day; the right of villagers to assemble and take
arms against robbery and force was armed. Finally, the Estates
undertook to raise taxes sucient to pay 30,000 soldiers for one
year, but the money was to be administered by the Estates, not
through the crown.
Resisting and procrastinating, the Dauphin refused to sign the
ordinance until he was browbeaten into it by Marcel’s technique of
bringing mobs released from work into the streets, increasing in
numbers each day, and encouraged to shout, “To arms!” By this
treatment the Dauphin’s signature was obtained under the title of
Regent, which the Estates required him to assume so that he could
commit the monarchy. The new Council of Thirty-six was installed,
while the ousted councillors hastened to Bordeaux to inform King
Jean. Just before he was carried o to London, the King repudiated
his son’s signature and the entire ordinance.
During the summer of 1357 neither the Dauphin nor the Council
was able to govern eectively while both sought support from the
provinces. By making a royal progress through the country to show
kingship still functioning, Charles had more success than Marcel.
When the Estates reconvened in April with very few nobles present,
it was clear that the nobility, resenting the terms of the Grand
Ordinance, was withdrawing support. The reform movement was in
trouble. Outside Paris the breakdown of authority was reaching
catastrophe.

Its catalyst was the brigandage of military companies spawned by
the warfare of the last fteen years. These were the Free Companies
who “write sorrow on the bosom of the earth” and were to become
the torment of the age. Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons
released after Poitiers by the Black Prince, as soldiers customarily
were to avoid further payment, they had acquired in the Prince’s
campaigns a taste for the ease and riches of plunder. Along with
German mercenaries and Hainault adventurers, they gathered in
groups of twenty to fty around a captain and moved northward to
operate in the area between the Seine and the Loire and between
Paris and the coast. After the truce of Bordeaux they were joined by
the forces of Philip of Navarre, by leftovers from the Duke of
Lancaster’s forces, and by experienced Breton captains and men-at-
arms, masters of the art of exploiting a region. The refrain of the
chronicles, arser et piller (burning and plundering), follows their
kind down the century.
The loss of the King and of so many nobles eased their
opportunity. In the year after the truce they swelled, merged,
organized, spread, and operated with ever more license. Seizing a
castle, they would use it as a stronghold from which to exact tribute
from every traveler and raid the countryside. They would spy out a
good town at one or two days’ journey “and go by covert ways day
and night and so enter the town unknown in the morning and set
re on some house; then they of the town would think it was done
by some men of war and so y away out of the town; and then these
brigands would break up coers and houses and rob and take what
they list and y away when they had done.”
They imposed ransoms on prosperous villages and burned the
poor ones, robbed abbeys and monasteries of their stores and
valuables, pillaged peasants’ barns, killed and tortured those who
hid their goods or resisted ransom, not sparing the clergy or the
aged, violated virgins, nuns, and mothers, abducted women as
enforced camp-followers and men as servants. As the addiction took
hold, they wantonly burned harvests and farm equipment and cut
down trees and vines, destroying what they lived by, in actions

which seem inexplicable except as a fever of the time or an
exaggeration of the chroniclers.
Companies of this kind had existed since the 12th century and
proliferated especially in Italy, where the nobility, more urban than
elsewhere, left the profession of arms increasingly to mercenaries.
Led by professional captains, the companies, sometimes numbering
2,000 to 3,000, were composed of exiles, outlaws, landless or
bankrupt adventurers, Germans, Burgundians, Italians, Hungarians,
Catalans, Provençals, Flemish, French, and Swiss, often splendidly
equipped on horse and foot. In mid-century the outstanding captain
was a renegade prior of the Knights of St. John called Fra Monreale,
who maintained a council, secretaries, accountants, camp judges,
and a gallows, and could command a price of 150,000 gold orins
from Venice to ght Milan. In the single year of 1353 he extorted
50,000 orins from Rimini, 25,000 from Florence, and 16,000 each
from Pisa and Siena. Invited to Rome by the revolutionary Cola di
Rienzi, who wanted his wealth, Monreale overcondently entered
alone, was seized, tried as a public robber, and executed. He went to
the block magnicently dressed in brown velvet embroidered in
gold and had his own surgeon direct the ax of the executioner.
Unrepentant at the end, he declared himself justied “in carving his
way with a sword through a false and miserable world.”
The most damaging aspect of the companies was that in the
absence of organized armies they lled a need and became
accepted. Philip VI, on learning how eectively a captain known
only as Bacon had surprised and seized a castle, bought his services
for 20,000 crowns and made him usher-at-arms, “ever well horsed,
appareled and armed like an earl.” Another, named Croquart,
starting as a “poor page” in the Breton wars, rose by prowess to
become a captain of brigands worth 40,000 crowns whose military
repute caused him to be chosen as one of the English side in the
Combat of Thirty. Afterward King Jean oered him a knighthood, a
rich wife, and annual pay of 2,000 livres if he would enter the
King’s service. Preferring his independence, Croquart refused.
More brigand than mercenary, the companies in France, though
basically English, attracted French knights ruined by the ransoms of

Brittany and Poitiers who now shared in the ravaging of their own
country. Lesser nobles reduced in revenue, younger sons and bastard
sons, made themselves captains and found in the companies a living,
a path to fortune, a way of life, a vent for the restless aggression
once absorbed by the crusades.
The most notorious of the French was Arnaut de Cervole, a noble
of Périgord called the “Archpriest” because of a clerical benece he
had once held. Wounded and captured at Poitiers, he had been
released on paying his ransom, and on return to France in the
anarchic months of 1357 made himself commander of a band which
called itself frankly enough Società dell’ acquisito. In collaboration
with a lord of Provence named Raimond des Baux, the band grew to
an army of 2,000 and the “Archpriest” into one of the great
evildoers of his time. In the course of a raid Cervole launched
through Provence in 1357, Pope Innocent VI felt so insecure in
Avignon that he negotiated for immunity in advance. Cervole was
invited to the papal palace, “received as reverently as if he had been
the son of the King of France,” and after dining several times with
the Pope and cardinals, was given a pardon for all his sins—a
regular item in the companies’ demands—and the sum of 40,000
écus to leave the area;
His equal among the English was Sir Robert Knollys, “the man of
few words,” whom Froissart judged “the most able and skillful man-
at-arms in all the companies.” He too had risen from the ranks in
the Breton wars and fought with the Thirty, gaining knighthood
along the way. After service with Lancaster he remained to plunder
Normandy with such skill and ruthlessness that he amassed in the
year 1357–58 booty worth 100,000 crowns. During the next two
years he established himself in the valley of the Loire, where he
gained control of forty castles and burned and sacked from Orléans
to Vézelay. In a raid through Berry and Auvergne his company left a
trail of ravaged towns whose charred gables were known as
“Knollys’ miters.” Such was the terror of his name that at one place,
it was said, people threw themselves into the river at word of his
approach.

Upon his informing King Edward that all the strongholds he had
captured were at the King’s disposal, Edward—who was pleased to
share, like other rulers, in the benets of banditry—handsomely
pardoned Knollys for activities that violated the truce. Knollys was
ultimately to earn high command and military renown on a level
with Chandos and the Black Prince. In truce and war he passed back
and forth from brigandage to service under the crown without
missing a beat or changing his style. At the end of his career he
retired with “regal wealth” and great estates to become a benefactor
of churches and founder of almshouses and chantries. The French
wrote him down as Sir Robert Canole, who “grievously harmed
France all the days of his life.”
In the anarchy after Poitiers, knights and brigands became
interchangeable, bringing added popular hatred upon the estate of
the sword, though not necessarily disrepute among their own kind.
The “young, bold and amorous” Eustache d’Aubrecicourt, a knight
of Hainault and companion of the Prince at Poitiers, turned brigand
with such élan and material success that he won the love of the
widowed Countess of Kent, a niece of the Queen of England and
Hainault-born like himself. She sent him horses, gifts, and
passionate letters which excited him to ever bolder if not more
chivalrous exploits. He fastened a savage grip upon Champagne and
part of Picardy until he was captured when French knights at last
organized in defense. Greedy as he, they let him be ransomed for
22,000 gold francs, so that he promptly renewed his warfare. In
command of 2,000 freebooters, he organized a trac in seized
castles, which were sold back to their owners at lucrative prices. In
some way understandable to the 14th century, his use of the sword
for robbery and murder carried no quality of dishonor to Isabelle of
Kent, who was to marry her now wealthy hero in 1360.
In response to French complaints that the English companies were
violating the truce, King Edward ordered them to disband, but his
orders were neither meant nor taken seriously. While peace terms
were still being negotiated, he was quite willing to let the
companies keep up pressure on France. No less averse to fomenting
trouble was Charles of Navarre. Though still in prison, he had

agents, including his brother Philip, active in his behalf. Where the
Navarrese joined forces with the English, the ravages were worst—
deliberately so, some thought, as a means of applying pressure for
Charles’s release.
For defense against the companies, villages made forts of their
stone churches, surrounding them with trenches, manning the bell
towers with sentinels, and piling up stones to throw down upon the
attackers. “The sound of church bells no longer summoned people to
praise the Lord but to take shelter from the enemy.” Peasant
families who could not reach the church spent nights with their
livestock on islands in the Loire or in boats anchored in mid-river.
In Picardy they took refuge in underground tunnels enlarged from
caves dug at the time of the Norman invasions. With a well in the
center and air holes above, the tunnels could shelter twenty or thirty
people with space around the walls for cattle.
At daylight the lookouts peered from the bell towers to see if the
bandits had gone and they could return to the elds. Country
families hastened with their goods to take refuge in cities, monks
and nuns abandoned their monasteries, highways and roads were
unsafe, robbers rose up everywhere, and enemies multiplied
throughout the land. “What more can I say?” writes Jean de Venette
in his catalogue of miseries. “Thence-forward innite harm,
misfortune and danger befell the French people for lack of good
government and adequate defense.”
A sympathizer of the Third Estate, Jean de Venette was a
Carmelite prior and head of the Order in the 1360s at the time he
was writing his chronicle. He blamed the Regent, who “applied no
remedy,” and the nobles, who “despised and hated all others and
took no thought for the mutual usefulness of lord and men. They
subjected and despoiled the peasants and villagers. In no wise did
they defend their country from its enemies. Rather did they trample
it underfoot, robbing and pillaging the peasants’ goods” while the
Regent “gave no thought to their plight.”
The nobles were to blame also, as Jean de Venette saw it, for
discord among the Estates General which caused the Estates to
abandon the task they had begun. “From that time on all went ill

with the kingdom, and the state was undone.… The country and
whole land of France began to put on confusion and mourning like a
garment because it had no defender or guardian.”
Grief and wrath pervade too a Latin polemic called “Tragic
Account of the Miserable State of the Realm of France” by an
obscure Benedictine monk. Ashamed for once-proud France which
let her King be captured “in the heart of the kingdom” and led
without interference to captivity on foreign soil, he raised the
crucial question of military discipline. “Where did you study [the art
of war]? Who were your teachers? In what was your
apprenticeship?” he asks the knights. “Was it while ghting under
the banners of Venus, sucking sweetness like milk, abandoned to
delights …” and so on in this vein until he suddenly concludes with
the practical question, “Can the military art be learned in the games
and hunts in which you pass your youth?”
The friar has censure left over for the common people, “whose
belly is their God and who are the slaves of their women,” and for
the clergy, who receive the worst scolding of all. They are sunk in
luxury, gluttony, pomp, ambition, anger, discord, envy, greed,
litigation, usury, and sacks of silver and gold. Virtues die, vices
triumph, honesty perishes, pity is stied, avarice pervades,
confusion overwhelms, order vanishes.
Was this merely the traditional monastic tirade upon the world, or
a deeper pessimism that begins to darken the second half of the
century?
King Jean’s release was still unsettled. While treating the royal
captive with elaborate honor, Edward was determined to squeeze
from his triumph every last inch of territory and ounce of money
that France could be made to yield. The great King of France,
snatched from the eld of Poitiers, was an extraordinary prize.
Jean’s entry into London as the Black Prince’s prisoner in May 1357
occasioned one of the greatest celebrations ever seen in England and
“great solemnities in all churches marvelous to think of.” Such was
the curiosity to see the French King that the procession took several

hours to cross the town to the palace of Westminster. As the center
of attention among the thirteen other noble prisoners, Jean was
dressed in black “like an archdeacon or a secular clerk,” and rode a
tall white horse alongside the Prince on a smaller black palfrey. Past
houses hung with captured shields and tapestries, over cobblestones
strewn with rose petals, the procession moved through fantasies of
pageantry that were the favorite art of the 14th century. In twelve
gilded cages along the route, the goldsmiths of London had
stationed twelve beautiful maidens, who scattered owers of gold
and silver ligree over the riders.
The éclat of the noble prisoners added chivalric distinction to the
English court. Christmas and New Year’s of the rst winter were
celebrated with extra pomp, including a splendid tournament held
at night under torchlight. Housed in the Savoy, the new palace of
the Duke of Lancaster, Jean was at liberty to receive visitors from
France and enjoy all the pleasures of court life, although assigned a
guard to prevent his escape or attempted rescue. Languedoc sent a
delegation of nobles and bourgeois with a gift of 10,000 orins and
the assurance that their lives, goods, and fortunes were dedicated to
his delivery. Even Laon and Amiens sent money. The mystique of
kingship possessed his subjects more than its responsibilities
concerned the King.
In France’s miserable hour, his accounts show expenses for horses,
dogs, and falcons, a chess set, an organ, a harp, a clock, a fawn-
colored palfrey, venison and whale meat from Bruges, and elaborate
wardrobes for his son Philip and for his favorite jester, who received
several ermine-trimmed hats ornamented with gold and pearls. Jean
maintained an astrologer and a “king of minstrels” with orchestra,
held a cockght, commissioned books with ne bindings, and sold
horses and wine he had received as gifts from Languedoc. The
success of this venture led him to import more of both from
Toulouse for sale as a protable business. Reading through Jean’s
accounts in the archives 500 years later, Jules Michelet, France’s
most vivid if not most objective historian, said they made him sick.

Negotiations of terms for the ransom of the King and the
conditions of a permanent peace treaty were obstructed by Edward’s
exorbitant demands. He wanted outright cession of Guienne, Calais,
and all the former Plantagenet holdings in France, plus an enormous
ransom of three million écus for Jean, in return for which he would
give up his claim to the French crown. Under pressure of the papal
delegates, the parleys dragged on while the French commissioners
twisted and turned in agony. The one solution they never
considered was to leave the King unransomed and go home. For one
thing, this would have meant no peace treaty, and battered France
had to have peace. More fundamentally, the King was a principle of
order. Since the reign of St. Louis, who had used the royal authority
to eliminate private wars, impose justice, and systematize taxes, the
crown had come to be equated in the public mind with greater
protection and law. All the back-sliding of his successors could not
soil the kingship, and Jean, its careless representative, was yearned
for as if he had been St. Louis.
The French provinces, believing royal power to be their last
resource for defense against the companies, did not want to see the
monarchy enfeebled. In August 1357 the Dauphin was emboldened
to reinstate the dismissed councillors and deantly to inform Marcel
and the Council of Thirty-six that he intended to govern alone
without their interference. Made an extremist by his frustrations,
Marcel accepted an ally utterly incompatible with his purpose.
Into the turmoil of November 1357 stepped Charles of Navarre
out of his prison near Cambrai in Picardy. Although a plot of his
partisans was credited with eecting his escape or release, behind it
the hand of Marcel and the mind of Robert le Coq were at work.
Charles of Navarre was to be used as an alternative King against the
Valois. He entered the capital “grandly accompanied” by nobles of
Picardy and Normandy, among them “Monseigneur de Coussi.” At
seventeen, Enguerrand had been receiving the homage of vassals as
their acknowledged lord. Probably sharing the anti-Valois
sentiments of many nobles of the north, he would have been swept

into the following of Charles of Navarre, although, with the
remarkable political sense he was to display throughout his life, he
did not stay there long.
With wonderful eloquence “seasoned by much venom,” Charles of
Navarre harangued a great assembly of Parisians, mentioning
without actually pressing his claim to the crown, which he said was
at least better than King Edward’s. His challenge forced the Dauphin
to reenter Paris and recall the Estates, and within a month, when he
had assembled “2,000” men-at-arms in the fortress of the Louvre, he
too took to the people. Sending couriers through the city to
assemble them, he spoke on horseback before a crowd gathered at
the Halles on January 11, 1358, turning sentiment at once in his
favor. Marcel’s deputy, who tried to make himself heard in
opposition, was drowned out in the shouting and turbulence.
Intensely susceptible to the spoken word, people of the time
responded to any Mark Antony and would listen for hours to the
outdoor sermons of great preachers, which they regarded as a form
of public entertainment.
Alarmed by the Dauphin’s success, Marcel resorted to an act of
violence in the unmistakable style of Charles of Navarre, and
generally believed, after the event, to have been instigated by him.
The pretext was the death of a citizen named Perrin Marc, who had
murdered the Dauphin’s treasurer and in turn had been forcefully
taken from sanctuary in a church by the Dauphin’s Marshal and
hung. Assembling 3,000 artisans and tradesmen, armed and wearing
the red-and-blue hoods of the popular party, Marcel marched at
their head to the royal palace. Regnaut d’Acy, one of the Dauphin’s
councillors, encountered in the street, was recognized and greeted
by shouts of “Death!” Before he could ee, he was struck down by
so many blows that he died without uttering a sound.
On reaching the palace, Marcel mounted with part of his company
to the Dauphin’s chamber, where, while he made a show of
protecting the prince, his men fell upon the Dauphin’s two Marshals
and slew them before his eyes. One was Jean de Clermont, son of
the Marshal killed at Poitiers; it was he who had broken the church
sanctuary. The other was Jean de Conans, Sire de Dampierre, a

former delegate to the Estates who had abandoned the reform party
for the Dauphin. Every illuminated chronicle pictures the scene: the
upraised swords of ercely frowning men, the terried Dauphin
cowering on his bed, the bloodied bodies of the Marshals at his feet.
Their corpses were dragged to the courtyard of the palace and left
there for all to see while Marcel hurried to the Place de Grève,
where he addressed the crowd from a window of the city hall,
asking their endorsement of his deed. It had been done, he said, for
the good of the kingdom and the removal of “false, wicked, and
traitorous” knights. With one voice the mob shouted its approval
and its adherence to the Provost “through life and death.” Marcel
promptly returned to the palace to present the Dauphin with that
ever-justifying formula: the deed had been done “by the will of the
people.” The prince, he said, must show himself at one with the
people by ratifying the act and pardoning everyone concerned.
“Grieving and dumbfounded,” the Dauphin could read the
warning of the sprawled bodies on the pavement. He prayed to the
Provost that the people of Paris might be his good friends as he was
theirs, and accepted from Marcel two lengths of red-and-blue cloth
to make hoods for himself and his ocers.
The terrible assault virtually upon his person had been designed
to intimidate the Dauphin into accepting rule by the Council of the
Estates. Instead it hardened the will beneath his deceptively feeble
exterior. All he could do for the moment was to send his family for
safety to the nearby fortress of Meaux on the Marne and remove
himself to Senlis outside the capital. Once violence had been used
against the monarchy, and against the nobility in the person of the
Marshals, the conict was to turn from political struggle to open
strife with a decisive shift in the balance of forces. The murder of
the Marshals cost Marcel what remained of support among the
nobles for reform. It convinced them that their interests lay with the
crown.
In May 1358 an act of the Dauphin-Regent precipitated the
ferocious uprising of the peasantry called the Jacquerie, in which

Enguerrand de Coucy at eighteen was swept into an active and
visible role. Intending to undercut Marcel by blockading Paris, the
Regent ordered the nobles along the valleys of waterborne
commerce to fortify and provision their castles. According to one
version, they seized the goods of their peasants for this purpose,
provoking the uprising. According to another chronicler, the
Jacques rose at the instigation of Marcel, who stirred them to
believe that the Regent’s order was directed against them as a
prelude to new oppressions and conscations. But the Jacques had
reason enough of their own.
What was this peasant who supported the three estates on his
back, this bent Atlas of the medieval world who now struck terror
through the seigneurial class? Snub-nosed and rough in belted tunic
and long hose, he can be seen in carved stone medallions and
illuminated pages representing the twelve months, sowing from a
canvas seed bag around his neck, scything hay bare-legged in
summer’s heat in loose blouse and straw hat, trampling grapes in a
wooden vat, shearing sheep held between his knees, herding swine
in the forest, tramping through the snow in hood and sheepskin
mantle with a load of rewood on his back, warming himself before
a re in a low hut in February. Alongside him in the elds the
peasant woman binds sheaves wearing a skirt caught up at the belt
to free her legs and a cloth head-covering instead of a hat.
Like every other group, peasants were diverse, ranging in
economic level from half-savage pauper to the proprietor of elds
and featherbeds who could hoard money to send his son to the
university. The general term for peasant was villein or vilain, which
had acquired a pejorative tone, though harmlessly derived from the
Latin villa. Neither exactly slave nor entirely free, the villein
belonged to the estate of his lord, under obligation to pay rent or
work services for use of the land, and in turn to enjoy the right of
protection and justice. A serf was someone in personal bondage who
belonged by birth to a particular lord, and, so that his children
should follow him, was forbidden under a rule called formariage
from marrying outside the domain. If he died childless, his house,

tools, and any possessions reverted to the lord under the right of
morte-main, on the theory that they had only been lent to the serf for
his labor in life. Originally he owed, in addition to agriculture,
every kind of labor service needed on an estate—repair of roads,
bridges, and moats, supply of rewood, care of stables and kennels,
blacksmithing, laundering, spinning, weaving, and other crafts for
the castle. By the 14th century much of this was done by hired
hands and the castle’s needs were supplied by purchase from towns
and peddlers, leaving a large part of the peasantry on a rent-paying
basis with a certain number of days’ work owed on the lord’s elds.
Besides paying the hearth tax and clerical tithe and aids for the
lord’s ransom and knighting of his son and marriage of his daughter,
the peasant owed fees for everything he used: for grinding his grain
in the lord’s mill, baking his bread in the lord’s oven, pressing
apples in the lord’s cider press, settlement of disputes in the lord’s
court. At death he owed the heriot, or forfeit of his best possession
to the lord.
His agricultural labor was supplied under rules that favored the
seigneur, whose elds were plowed and seed sowed and hay cut and
crops harvested and, in case of storm or pests, his harvest saved
before the peasant could attend to his own. He had to drive his
beasts to pasture and bring them home across the lord’s elds rather
than his own so that the lord should have the benet of the manure.
By these fees and arrangements, economic surplus was produced for
the proprietors.
The system was aided by the Church, whose natural interests
allied it more to the great than to the meek. The Church taught that
failure to do the seigneur’s work and obey his laws would be
punished by eternity in Hell, and that non-payment of tithes would
imperil the soul. The priest exerted constant pressure for tithes in
kind—grain, eggs, a hen or a pig—and told the peasant these were a
tax “owed to God.” Everyday life was administered by the lord’s
baili, whose abuses and extortions were a constant source of
complaint. The baili could levy an augmented tax, keeping a
percentage for himself, or accuse a peasant of theft and accept a fee
for letting him o.

Rents were generally reckoned in pennies earned by paid labor
and sale of produce in the market. At harvest-time, men and women
ocked to the grape-picking for extra cash and a few weeks’ fun.
Women were paid at half the rate of the men. The worst fear was
famine, and local shortages were common because transportation
was poor and yield, owing to inadequate fertilizer, low.
Possession of a plow which cost 10 to 12 livres and of a plow
horse at 8 to 10 livres was the line between a peasant who
prospered and one who just survived. Those too poor to aord a
plow rented a communal one or turned the earth with hoe and
spade. Perhaps 75 to 80 percent were below the plow line, of whom
half had a few acres and some economic security while the rest lived
on the edge of subsistence, cultivating tiny plots supplemented by
paid work for the lord or for richer neighbors. The lowest 10
percent existed in misery on a diet of bread, onions, and a little
fruit, sleeping on straw, living without furniture in a cabin with a
hole in the roof to let out the smoke. Without even the tenure of
serfs, they were a new agricultural proletariat created as the old
manorial system was changing to a money basis.
What proportion of the peasantry was well o and what poor is
judged by what they bequeathed, and since the poorest had nothing
to leave, they remain mute. For no other class is that famous goal of
the historian, wie es wirklich war (how it really was), so elusive. For
every statement on peasant life there is another that contradicts it. It
has been said that “bathing was common among the lower
classes … even small villages had their public bath houses,” yet the
French peasant’s contemporaries incessantly complained of his lth
and foul smell. While the English of the time seem to agree that the
French peasant was worse o than their own and frequently
comment on his meatless diet, he is elsewhere recorded as regularly
eating pork and fowl roasted on a spit. He also had access to eggs,
salt sh, cheese, lard, peas, beans, shallots, onions, garlic, and some
leaf vegetables grown in his kitchen garden, fruits cooked in juice or
dried for winter, rye bread, honey, and beer or cider.
The middle group would own a bed for the whole family, a trestle
table with benches, a chest, cupboard, wardrobe, iron and tin

cooking pots, clay bowls and jugs, homemade baskets, wooden
buckets and washtubs, in addition to farming tools. They lived in
one-story, wood-framed houses with thatched roof and plaster walls
made of various mixtures of clay, straw, and pebbles. Most such
houses had Dutch doors to let light and air in and smoke out, some
had tiny windows, the best had walled chimneys. Life expectancy
was short owing to overwork, overexposure, and the aictions of
dysentery, tuberculosis, pneumonia, asthma, tooth decay, and the
terrible rash called St. Anthony’s Fire, which by constriction of the
blood vessels (not then understood) could consume a limb as by
“some hidden re” and sever it from the body. In modern times the
disease has been identied in some cases as erysipelas and in others
as ergot poisoning caused by a fungus on rye our kept too long
over the winter.
The auent few might own sixty to eighty acres, plow-horses and
rope harness, sheep, pigs, cattle, stores of wool, hides, and hemp,
and of wheat, oats, and corn, a boat and net for shing in the river,
a vineyard, a woodpile, and vessels of copper, glass, and silver.
Their homes contained, in the case of one comfortable peasant of
Normandy, two featherbeds, one wooden bed, three tables, four
skillets, two pots and other cooking utensils, eight sheets, two
tablecloths, one towel or napkin, a lantern, two vats for trampling
grapes, two barrels and two casks, a cart, a plow, two harrows, two
hoes, two scythes, one spade, one sickle, three horse collars, and a
pack saddle. Rich peasants are recorded who employed a dozen eld
hands and gave their daughters dowries of 50 gold orins plus a fur-
trimmed mantle and fur bedcover.
Truer to the mass is the peasant who cries, in the French tale
Merlin Merlot, “Alas, what will become of me who never has a single
day’s rest? I do not think I shall ever know repose or ease.… Hard is
the hour when the villein is born. When he is born, suering is born
with him.” His children go hungry, holding out their hands to him
for food; his wife assails him as a poor provider. “And I, unhappy
one, I am like a rooster soaked in the rain, head hanging and
bedraggled, or like a beaten dog.”

A deep grievance of the peasant was the contempt in which he
was held by the other classes. Aside from the rare note of
compassion, most tales and ballads depict him as aggressive,
insolent, greedy, sullen, suspicious, tricky, unshaved, unwashed,
ugly, stupid and credulous or sometimes shrewd and witty,
incessantly discontented, usually cuckolded. In satiric tales it was
said the villein’s soul would nd no place in Paradise or anywhere
else because the demons refused to carry it owing to the foul smell.
In the chansons de geste he is scorned as inept in combat and poorly
armed, mocked for his manners, his morals, even his misery. The
name Jacques or Jacques Bonhomme to designate a peasant was
used by nobles as a term of derision derived from the padded
surplice called “jacque” which the peasant wore for protective armor
in war. The knights saw him as a person of ignoble instincts who
could have no understanding of “honor” and was therefore capable
of every kind of deceit and incapable of trust. Ideally he should be
treated decently, yet the accepted proverb ran, “Smite a villein and
he will bless you; bless a villein and he will smite you.”
An extraordinary passage from the tale Le Despit au Vilain breathes
hatred with an intensity that seems more than mere storytelling.
“Tell me, Lord, if you please, by what right or title does a villein eat
beef?… And goose, of which they have plenty? And this troubles
God. God suers from it and I too. For they are a sorry lot, these
villeins who eat fat goose! Should they eat sh? Rather let them eat
thistles and briars, thorns and straw and hay on Sunday and pea-
pods on weekdays. They should keep watch without sleep and have
trouble always; that is how villeins should live. Yet each day they
are full and drunk on the best wines, and in ne clothes. The great
expenditures of villeins comes at a high cost, for it is this that
destroys and ruins the world. It is they who spoil the common
welfare. From the villein comes all unhappiness. Should they eat
meat? Rather should they chew grass on the heath with the horned
cattle and go naked on all fours.…” These tales were addressed to
an upper-class audience. Was this what they wanted to hear, or was
it a satire of their attitude?

In theory, the tiller of the soil and his livestock were immune
from pillage and the sword. No reality of medieval life more harshly
mocked the theory. Chivalry did not apply outside the knights’ own
class. The records tell of peasants crucied, roasted, dragged behind
horses by the brigands to extort money. There were preachers who
pointed out that the peasant worked unceasingly for all, often
overwhelmed by his tasks, and who pleaded for more kindness, but
all they could advise the victim was patience, obedience, and
resignation.
In 1358 his misery had reached a peak. Brigands seized the seed
grain out of his hand, stole his animals for their food, his carts for
their loot, his tools and plowshares to forge their weapons. Yet the
lords continued to demand fees and taxes and extra aids for their
heavy ransoms, “and even for that hardly put themselves out to
protect their vassals from attack.” The common people “groaned,”
wrote Jean de Venette, “to see dissipated in games and ornaments
the sums they had so painfully furnished for the needs of war.” They
resented the nobles’ failure to use them in the ght against the
enemy and felt less fear of them as the knights lost prestige in the
defeats since Crécy and in the cowardice at Poitiers. Above all, they
saw the complicity in lawlessness of the knight who, if he could not
pay a brigand’s demand for ransom, took service with his company
for a year or two, “so easy it was to make out of a gentleman a
brigand.” No plan of revolution, but simple hate ignited the
Jacquerie.
On May 28, 1358, in the village of St. Leu near Senlis on the Oise,
a group of peasants held an indignation meeting in the cemetery
after vespers. They blamed the nobles for their miseries and for the
capture of the King, “which troubled all minds.” What had the
knights and squires done to liberate him? What were they good for
except to oppress poor peasants? “They shamed and despoiled the
realm, and it would be a good thing to destroy them all.” Listeners
cried, “They say true! They say true! Shame on him who holds
back!”

Without further council and no arms but the staves and knives
that some carried, a group of about 100 rushed in erce assault
upon the nearest manor, broke in, killed the knight, his wife, and
children, and burned the place down. Then, according to Froissart,
whose tales of the Jacquerie would have been obtained from nobles
and clergy, “they went to a strong castle, tied the knight to a stake
while his wife and daughter were raped by many, one after another
before his eyes; then they killed the wife who was pregnant and
afterward the daughter and all the children and lastly the knight
and burned and destroyed the castle.” Other reports say that four
knights and ve squires were killed on that night.
Instantly the outbreak spread, gathering adherents each day to
join with torches and burning brushwood in the assault upon castles
and manors. They came with scythes, pitchforks, hatchets, and any
kind of implement that could be made a weapon. Soon thousands—
ultimately, it was said, 100,000—were engaged in attacks covering
the Oise valley, the Ile de France, and closer regions of Picardy and
Champagne, and raging “throughout the seigneurie of Coucy, where
there were great outrages.” Before it was over more than “100”
castles and manors in the territories of Coucy and Valois and the
dioceses of Laon, Soissons, and Senlis were sacked and burned and
more than “60” in the districts of Beauvais and Amiens.
Forming no concerted defense, the nobles at the outset panicked
and ed with their families to the walled towns, leaving their homes
and all their goods. The Jacques continued killing and burning
“without pity or mercy like enraged dogs.” Surely, says Froissart,
“never among Christians or even Saracens were such outrages
committed as by these wicked people, such things as no human
creature should dare think or see.” The example he cites, taken from
the antecedent chronicle of Jean le Bel, tells of a knight whom the
Jacques “killed and roasted on a spit before the eyes of his wife and
children. Then after ten or twelve of them violated the lady they
forced her to eat some of her husband’s esh and then killed her.”
Repeated over and over in subsequent accounts, this one story
became the mainstay of the atrocity tales.

In registered accusations after the event, the killings amount to a
total of thirty (not including the roasted knight and lady), including
one “spy” who had a trial before his execution. Destruction and
looting were more practiced than murder. One group of Jacques
made straight for the poultry yard, seized all the chickens they
could lay hold of, shed carp out of the pond, took wine from the
cellars and cherries from the orchard, and gave themselves a feast at
the nobles’ expense. As the insurgents organized, they supplied
themselves from the castles’ stores, burning furniture and buildings
when they moved on. In districts where hatred for the clergy
equaled that for the nobles, the Jacques warred on the Church; the
cloistered trembled in their monasteries, the secular clergy ed to
refuge in the towns.
A peasant leader arose in the person of one Guillaume Karle or
Cale, described as a strong, handsome Picard of natural eloquence
and experience in war, which was what the Jacques most needed.
He organized a council which issued orders stamped by an ocial
seal, and appointed captains elected by each locality, and
lieutenants for squads of ten. His men fashioned swords out of
scythes and billhooks and improvised armor of boiled leather. Cale
adopted “Montjoie!” as his battle cry and ordered banners made
with the eur-de-lys, by which the Jacques wished to show they
were rising against the nobles, not the King.
Cale’s hope was to win the alliance of the towns in a joint action
against the nobles; it was here that the two movements, peasant and
bourgeois, came together. Few towns of the north “were not against
the gentilhommes,” according to the monk of St. Denis who wrote
the Chronicle of the Reigns of Jean II and Charles V, while at the same
time many feared and despised the Jacques. Lesser bourgeois,
however, saw the peasant rising as a common war of non-nobles
against nobles and clergy. Towns like Senlis and Beauvais where the
party of the red-and-blue hoods was dominant and radical, acted in
solidarity with the Jacques, supplied food and opened their gates to
them. Many of their citizens joined the peasant ranks. Beauvais,
with the consent of mayor and magistrates, executed several nobles

whom the Jacques had sent to them as prisoners. Amiens held trials
condemning nobles to death in absentia.
Compiègne, on the other hand, which was Cale’s major objective
refused to surrender the nobles who had taken refuge there, shut its
gates, and strengthened its walls. At Caen in Normandy, where the
rising failed to take re, an agitator for the Jacques, with a
miniature plow pinned to his hat, toured the streets crying for
sympathizers to follow him, but aroused no recruits and was later
killed by three townsmen whom he had insulted.
According to letters of pardon after the event, individual
bourgeois—butchers, coopers, carters, sergeants, royal ocers,
priests and other clerics—made themselves accomplices of the
Jacques, especially in the looting of property. Even men of the
gentry appear in the pardons, but whether they were moved by
belief, opportunity for loot, excitement, or force majeure is
uncertain. Knights, squires, and clerks accused of having led peasant
bands always claimed afterward that they had been forced into
service to save their necks, which may well have been true, for the
Jacques felt painfully the lack of military leaders.
Their captains had little control. At Verberie a captain, on
returning from a raid with a captured squire and his family, was
surrounded by citizens howling death to the squire. “For god’s sake,
good sirs,” the captain pleaded, “keep yourselves from such an act
or you will be committing a crime.” To this man the killing of a
noble was still a fearsome thing, but not to the mob, who sliced o
the squire’s head on the spot.
As the rampage spread against all landowners’ estates, the
Jacques, when asked why they did these things, replied “that they
knew not but they saw others do it and they thought they would
thus destroy all the nobles and gentry in the world and there would
be none any more.” Whether or not the peasants really envisaged a
world without nobles, the gentry assumed they did and felt the hot
breath of annihilation. Seized by that terror the mass inspires when
it overthrows authority, they sent for help from their fellows in
Flanders, Hainault, and Brabant.

At a critical moment for Marcel, the rage of the Jacquerie oered
him an added weapon, which he seized in a fatal choice that was to
lose him the support of the propertied class. At his instigation, the
estates of the hated royal councillors were made the targets of a
band of Jacques organized in the environs of Paris under the
command of two merchants of the capital. The properties of the
King’s chamberlain, Pierre d’Orgement, and of those two inveterate
peculators, Simon de Buci and Robert de Lorris, were sacked and
destroyed. Breaking into the castle of Ermenonville, one of the many
benets of royal favor bestowed on Robert de Lorris, a combined
force of bourgeois and Jacques cornered the owner inside. On his
knees before his enemies, he was forced to take an oath to disown
the “gentry and nobility” and swear loyalty to the commune of
Paris.
Compromised by murder and destruction, Marcel had mounted
the tiger. The royal family at Meaux was the next target of the band
from Paris. Enlarged as they marched along the Marne by bands of
Jacques coming from many places and by many paths, the combined
group numbering “9,000” reached Meaux on June 9 “with great will
to do evil.” Prospects of rape and death lled the fortress called the
Market of Meaux, where the Dauphin’s wife, sister, and infant
daughter with some 300 ladies and their children were guarded by a
small company of lords and knights. The Mayor and magistrates of
Meaux, who had sworn loyalty to the Dauphin and promised to
allow no “dishonor” to his family, crumbled before the invaders.
Either in fear or in welcome, the citizens opened the gates and set
out tables in the streets with napkins and bread, meat and wine. On
approaching a town, the marauding Jacques customarily let it be
known that they expected such provisions. Pouring into the city, the
fearful horde lled the streets with “savage cries” while the ladies in
the fortress, say the chroniclers, trembled in anguish.
At that moment, knighthood errant galloped to the rescue in the
persons of that glittering pair, the Captal de Buch and Gaston
Phoebus, Count of Foix. Although one owed fealty to England and
the other to France, they were cousins who were riding home
together from a “crusade” in Prussia, where they had gone to keep

themselves occupied during the truce after Poitiers. Neither was a
friend of the Valois, but noble ladies in danger were every knight’s
cause, and these two from the south did not share the initial
paralysis of the northerners under the onslaught of the Jacques. Nor
had either been involved in the shame of Poitiers. Learning of the
peril at Meaux, they hastened to the relief with a company of forty
lances (120 men), reaching the Market of Meaux on the same day
the commoners entered the city. Connected by a bridge to the city,
the fortress, surrounded by walls and towers, was situated on a strip
of land between the river and a canal.
At the head of twenty-ve knights in bright armor with pennants
of argent and azure displaying stars and lilies and couchant lions,
the Captal and the Count rode through the portcullis onto the
bridge. In its narrow connes where superiority of numbers could
not be mustered, the commoners unwisely chose to ght. Wielding
weapons from horseback, the knights cut down their opponents,
trampling them, toppling bodies into the river, forcing the rest back
across the bridge, and opening the way to carnage. Despite some
hard hand-to-hand ghting, the “small dark villeins poorly armed”
recoiled before the lances and axes of the mailed warriors and,
succumbing to terrorized retreat, were butchered. The knights
charged, hacking furiously, killing the commoners like beasts, until
exhausted from the slaughter.
“Several thousand” were slain, according to the chroniclers’
impossible gures, which testify nevertheless to an appalling toll.
Fleeing remnants were chased through the countryside and
exterminated. The knights lost but a few, one with an arrow through
his eye. Their fury, growing by what it fed on, was unleashed in
vengeance upon the town, which was put to pillage and ames.
Houses and even churches were sacked, leaving nothing of value
behind; the Mayor was hanged, many of the citizens massacred,
others imprisoned, others burned inside their houses. Meaux burned
for two weeks and was afterward condemned for lèse majesté and
suppressed as an independent commune.
Meaux was the turning point. Gaining courage from the conquest,
French nobles of the area joined in desolating the surrounding

country, wreaking more damage on France, said Jean de Venette,
than had the English. From there, the suppression of the Jacquerie
followed, and in its train the fall of Marcel.
Charles of Navarre led the counter-action in Picardy and the
Beauvais region, pushed thereto by the nobles of his party. They
went to him saying that “if those who are called Jacques continue
for long they will bring the gentry to nothing and destroy
everything.” As one of the great nobles of the world, he must not
suer his own kind to be so reduced. Knowing that he could gain
the crown, or the power he wanted, only with the support of the
nobility, Charles was persuaded. With a force of several hundred
including the “baron de Coussi,” he marched against the Jacques
gathered at Clermont under Guillaume Cale. Cale sensibly ordered
his army of several thousand to fall back upon Paris for the support
and aid of the city, but the Jacques, eager for a ght, refused to
obey. Cale then deployed them in the traditional three battalions, of
which two, led by archers and crossbowmen, were stationed behind
a line of baggage wagons. The third, of 600 horsemen poorly
mounted and many without arms, was held in support.
Sounding trumpets and shouting battle cries, with tattered
banners ying, the peasants faced the enemy. Surprised by this
organized resistance, Navarre preferred guile and treachery. He
invited Cale to parley, and upon this invitation from a king, Cale’s
common sense apparently deserted him. Considering himself an
opponent in war to whom the laws of chivalry applied, he went to
the parley without a guard, whereupon his royal and noble
opponent had him seized and thrown into chains. The capture of
their leader by such easy and contemptuous treachery drained the
Jacques’ condence and hope of success. When the nobles charged,
the commoners succumbed like their fellows at Meaux and suered
equal slaughter. Only a few who hid among the brush escaped the
swords of the searching horsemen. Surrounding villages handed
over fugitives to the nobles. Pursuing the attack elsewhere in the
region, Navarre and his company massacred “3,000” more peasants,
including 300 burned alive in a monastery where they had taken
refuge. To consummate his victory, Charles of Navarre beheaded

Guillaume Cale after reportedly crowning him, in wicked mockery,
King of the Jacques with a circlet of red-hot iron.
As the savage repression swept north, its new leader emerged in
Enguerrand de Coucy, whose domain had been at the center of the
storm. The Jacques were never able to reassemble, says Froissart,
because “the young sire de Coucy gathered a great number of
gentlemen who put an end to them wherever they found them
without pity or mercy.” That so young a man should have taken the
leadership bespeaks a strong personality, but nothing more about
him can be learned from the episode. The Chronique Normande and
other accounts also mention his hunting down peasants through
hamlets and villages and hanging them from trees while his
neighbor the Comte de Roussi hung them from the doors of their
cottages. The totality of what is known is xed by the 19th century
authority Père Denie: “It was chiey Enguerrand VII, the young
seigneur de Coucy, who, at the head of the gentry of his barony,
completed the extermination of the Jacques.”
Reinvigorated by the blood of Meaux, the nobles of that region
nished o the Jacquerie between Seine and Marne. “They ung
themselves upon hamlets and villages, putting them to the ame
and pursuing poor peasants in houses, elds, vineyards and forest to
be miserably slaughtered.” By June 24, 1358, “20,000” Jacques had
been killed and the countryside converted to a wasteland.
The futile rising was over, having lasted, despite its long shadow,
less than a month, of which two weeks were taken up by the
repression. Nothing had been gained, nothing changed, only more
death. Like every insurrection of the century, it was smashed, as
soon as the rulers recovered their nerve, by weight of steel, and the
advantage of the man on horseback, and the psychological
inferiority of the insurgents. Reckless of consequence, the
landowners, who were already suering from the shortage of labor
after the plague, let revenge take precedence over self-interest.
Within the next month the struggle in Paris came to a climax and
an end. Since the day after Poitiers, Marcel had kept men at work

extending the walls, strengthening the gates, building moats and
barriers. Now fully enclosed and fortied, the capital was the key to
power. From Vincennes on the outskirts, the Regent with assembled
nobles was probing for an entry; Marcel, who had lost sight of every
purpose but overpowering the Regent, was planning to deliver the
capital to Charles of Navarre; the eel-like Navarre was negotiating
with both sides and was in contact with Navarrese and English
forces outside the walls.
At a mass meeting staged for him by Marcel in the Place de Grève,
he told the crowd that “he would have been King of France if his
mother had been a man.” Planted demonstrators responded with
shouts of “Navarre! Navarre!” While the majority, shocked by the
disloyalty, remained silent, he was elected by acclamation Captain
of Paris. His acceptance of the oce on the side of the people
alienated many of his noble supporters, for they did not wish to be
“against the gentry.” Probably at this time Enguerrand de Coucy fell
away from the Navarrese party, for he soon afterward appeared in
opposition to it.
Under Marcel too the ground was breaking away like ice in a
river. His connivance with the Jacques frightened many of the
“good towns” and, more seriously, caused the disaection of the
upper bourgeois in his own city. In the chaos and scarcities and
disruption of trade, they veered toward the Regent as the only focus
in the desperate need for authority. Paris was coming apart in
furious factions, some for ghting to the end behind Marcel, some
for deposing Navarre, some for admitting the Regent, all red by
hatred of the English, who were ravaging the outskirts with daily
atrocity. With his support waning, Marcel was reduced to the naked
need of armed force. On July 22, in the act that turned sentiment
against him, he allowed Charles of Navarre to bring a band of
English men-at-arms into the city. Aroused and armed Parisians fell
upon them with such eect that they had to be locked up in the
fortress of the Louvre for protection.
Meanwhile the prosperous bourgeois feared that if the Regent
succeeded in taking the city by force instead of surrender, all

citizens alike would be subjected to punishment and plunder.
Unable to force Marcel to yield the city, they determined to dispose
of him on the theory that “it was better to kill than be killed.” Amid
cabals and enemies and inexplicable events, the citizens were easy
prey to whispers of treachery on the part of the Provost.
On July 31 the end came when Marcel appeared at the Porte St.
Denis and ordered the guards to deliver the keys of the gate to
ocers of the King of Navarre. The guards refused, shouting
betrayal of the city. Weapons ashed, and a draper named Jean
Maillart, evidently pre-equipped, unfurled the royal banner,
mounted his horse, and raised the royal battle cry “Montjoie–St.
Denis!” Crowds took up the cry, clashes and confused alarms
erupted. Marcel next appeared across the city at the Porte St.
Antoine, where he again demanded the keys and met the same
response, which was led by a certain Pierre des Essars, a knighted
bourgeois and cousin by marriage of both Maillart and Marcel. In a
rush upon the Provost, the guards of St. Antoine struck him down,
and when the bloodstained weapons had lifted and the melee had
cleared, the body of Etienne Marcel lay trampled and dead in the
street.
Two of his companions were also killed, and others of his party
were stripped, beaten, and left naked under the walls. “Then the
people rushed o to nd others to treat the same way.” More of the
Provost’s partisans were murdered and dumped naked in the streets.
While Charles of Navarre escaped to St. Denis, the royalist faction
took control and two days later, on August 2, 1358, opened the city
to the Regent.
He at once proclaimed a pardon for the citizens of Paris except for
close associates of Marcel and Navarre, who were executed or
banished, and their conscated property turned over to the Regent’s
party. But the spirit of the blue-and-red hoods remained strong
enough to cause angry demonstrations when more of Marcel’s
adherents were arrested. The situation was sullen and dangerous.
On August 10 the Regent issued a general amnesty and ordered
nobles and peasantry to pardon each other so that the elds might

be cultivated and the harvest brought in. The extermination of the
Jacques was making itself felt.
With Marcel’s death the reform movement was aborted; the
glimpse of “Good Government” was to remain only a glimpse. After
Artevelde and Rienzi, Marcel was the third leader of a bourgeois
rising within a dozen years to be killed by his own followers. The
people of France on the whole were not ready for an eort to limit
the monarchy. They blamed all their troubles—heavy taxes,
dishonest government, debased coinage, military defeats, banditry
of the companies, the fallen condition of the realm—on the crown’s
evil councillors and the caiti nobles, not on the King, who had
fought bravely at Poitiers, or even on the Dauphin. No political
movement sprang from Marcel’s bones. The right of the Estates
General to convene at will was lost, the provisions of the Grand
Ordinance largely, though not entirely, discarded. The crown was
left free for the period of royal absolutism that history held in
waiting.
Though the Regent held Paris, he was ringed by enemies. From St.
Denis, Charles of Navarre announced open deance and renewed his
alliance with King Edward. “Very grievous and cruel,” the
undeclared warfare of Navarrese and English companies intensied,
individual groups were ghting back, the land was prey to local
battles and raids, the besieging of castles and burning of villages.
Caught up in the havoc, “the young Sire de Coucy carefully guarded
his castle and territory,” with the aid of two redoubtable warriors.
One was his former guardian Matthieu de Roye, who on one
occasion forced the surrender of and took prisoner an entire English
company of 300. The other was the governor of Coucy’s domain, a
“hard and valiant knight” called the Chanoine de Robersart, who
“made himself more feared by the English and Navarrese than
anyone else, for he chased them many times.”
Enguerrand’s own feat was to destroy the castle of Bishop Robert
le Coq, who was attempting to carry Laon over to the camp of
Charles of Navarre. The particulars are unrecorded except for the

fact that the Sire de Coucy “did not like the said Bishop.” Otherwise,
by paying wages to his men-at-arms and allowing no one to remain
outside the walls, he kept the brigands at bay, although they
succeeded in capturing the neighboring castle of the Comte de
Roussi, “causing great scarcity” in the district. Through untilled
elds and charred villages, scarcity was stalking France.

Concy-le-Château as it would have appeared in the 14th century.
From a 16th century engraving.(illustration credit 7.1)

The abandoned castle in later years.
From Du Sommerard’s Les Arts au Moyen Age, 1838–46.(illustration

credit 7.2)
3. Fortune’s wheel.
From a mid-14th century manuscript of Roman de la Rose.(illustration
credit 7.3)

COUCY’S SEALS (illustration credit 7.4)

Chaucer’s squire.
From the Ellesmere manuscript, c. 1410.(illustration credit 7.5)

A 14th century carriage (followed by three horsemen wearing Jews’
hats). From an illustrated Bible showing Jacob’s journey to Egypt. The
three horsemen are Jacob’s sons.(illustration credit 7.6)

View of Paris. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges copy, c.
1460.(illustration credit 7.7)

A country village among the trees. From Bartholomew of England’s
Book on the Nature of Things, a manuscript of c. 1410.(illustration
credit 7.8)

Charles of Navarre. From a window in the Cathedral of Evreux.
(illustration credit 7.9)

Jean II. Portrait attributed to his court painter, Girard d’Orléans.
(illustration credit 7.10)

The Black Prince. Egy in Canterbury Cathedral.(illustration
credit 7.11)

English archers training with the longbow (the unpulled bows are the
height of a man). From the Luttrell Psalter, late 13th century.
(illustration credit 7.12)

View of London.
From Poems of Charles d’Orléans, early 15th century.(illustration
credit 7.13)

The Last Judgment, the Elect and the Damned.
From the Cathedral of Bourges, west portal.(illustration credit 7.14)

The world as a globe. From L’Image du Monde by Gautier de Metz,
a 14th century manuscript.(illustration credit 7.15)

The child’s education. From Avis aus Roys, a manual of instruction
for French kings and princes, mid-14th century.(illustration credit
7.16)

The pillage and burning of a town. From Froissart’s Chronicles,
Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 7.17)

A charivari. From Roman de Fauvel, an early 14th century
manuscript.(illustration credit 7.18)

The fourth horseman of the apocalypse. “And Behold a pale horse,
and he that sat upon him his name was Death …” (Revelation 6 : 8).
Illustration for the Oce of the Dead by Jean Colombe for the Très
Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, c. 1470.(illustration credit 7.19)

The Triumph of Death. A detail from a fresco by Francesco Traini
in the Camposanto, Pisa, c. 1350.(illustration credit 7.20)

Burial of the plague victims. From Annales de Gilles li Muisis.
(illustration credit 7.21)

Penitential procession led by the Pope during the plague (pictured in
14th century Rome although it purports to illustrate the 6th century
plague under Gregory the Great). By Pol de Limbourg for the Très
Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, c. 1410.(illustration credit 7.22)

A Cardinal. Detail from the Nine Hours Tapestries, French, late 14th
century.(illustration credit 7.23)

Knights. Seals of Amadeo V of Savoy (right) and Louis I, Duc
d’Anjou.(illustration credit 7.24)

Peasants. Labors of the Twelve Months. Manuscript of Crescenzi li
Rustican, c. 1460.(illustration credit 7.25)

The slaughter of the Jacques on the bridge at Meaux. From
Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration
credit 7.26)

Murder of the marshals. From the Grandes Chroniques, copy
executed for Charles V, c. 1375.(illustration credit 7.27)

The alaunt as war-dog, used against the horses of mounted brigands
or men-at-war. From the 14th century manuscript Tractatus de Pauli
Sanctini Ducensis de re militari et machinis bellicis.(illustration
credit 7.28)

The Battle of Slays. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges
copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 7.29)

Widowed Rome.(illustration credit 7.30)

Florence, 15th century.(illustration credit 7.31)

Chapter 8

A
Hostage in England
ll this time eorts in London to conclude a permanent peace
treaty had not succeeded. When the French balked at the
terms of a settlement reached in 1358, Edward responded by
raising his demands. In March 1359 when the truce was
about to expire, King Jean yielded, trading half his kingdom for his
own release. By the Treaty of London he surrendered virtually all of
western France from Calais to the Pyrenees, and agreed to an
augmented and catastrophic ransom of 4 million gold écus, payable
at xed installments, to be guaranteed by the delivery of forty royal
and noble hostages, of whom Enguerrand de Coucy was designated
as one. In case of obstruction to the transfer of ceded territories,
Edward retained the right to send armed forces back to France,
whose cost was to be borne by the French King.
Desperate for peace though France was, shame and anger rose
when the terms became known. Dragged to maturity in the grim
years since Poitiers, the Dauphin had learned greater stewardship
than his father. Neither he nor his Council was prepared to yield
what the King of France had agreed to. Facing a fearful choice
between accepting the treaty and renewal of the war, they
summoned the Estates General with a request for “the most
substantial notable and wise men” bearing full powers to represent
the communes.
In this somber hour, one of the darkest in French history, the few
delegates who braved the bandit-infested roads to come to Paris
were in earnest. When the text of the Treaty of London was read to
them on May 19, they deliberated briey and made their response
to the Dauphin without dispute. It was for once laconic. “They said
the Treaty was displeasing to all the people of France and
intolerable, and for this they ordered war to be made on England.”

Edward prepared to launch a supreme eort to consummate
victory. He laid the cause to French “perdy” in rejecting the treaty,
thus establishing grounds for a “just war” and allowing bishops to
oer indulgences in aid of recruitment. Determined to assemble an
expeditionary force that should lack nothing to make it invincible,
he spent all summer gathering the components. An immense convoy
of 1,100 ships carrying 11,000 to 12,000 men and more than 3,000
horses (to be joined by as many more at Calais) was assembled, with
1,000 carts and some four-horse wagons for the baggage train, plus
tents, forges, hand mills, horseshoes and nails, bows and arrows,
arms and armor, cooking utensils, initial stocks of wine and food,
leather boats for shing in the rivers, not forgetting, for the hunt,
thirty falconers with hawks, sixty couple of hounds, and sixty of
harriers.
By the time the King embarked, taking with him his four eldest
sons, it was the end of October, ensuring a winter campaign. All
military experience, including his own, knew this to be ruinous to a
force away from its home base, but the impetus of great
preparations is hard to halt, and possession of many garrisons in
France gave Edward condence in a quick victory.
England’s fortunes were at the crest. A dynamic King had
attracted the aid of an extraordinary group of able soldiers—
Chandos, Knollys, Sir Walter Manny, Sir Hugh Calveley, the Captal
de Buch, and not least the Prince of Wales—such a group “as the
Starres have an inuence to produce at one time more than
another.” Success was tangible. “A woman who did not possess spoil
from France,” wrote the chronicler Walsingham, “garments, furs,
bed covers, silver vessels and cloth of linen, was of no account.”
Ebullience had reached a perfect moment in 1350 when King
Edward sailed forth to meet a Spanish challenge. On board the cog
Thomas in August, as described by Froissart, the King, in a black
velvet doublet and round beaver hat “which became him well,” sat
in the forecastle enjoying talk and song with the Prince and a group
of nobles. “The King was that day, as I was told by those present, as
joyous as ever he was in his life and ordered the minstrels to play
before him an Almaine dance which Sir John Chandos had lately

introduced.” He commanded Sir John to dance and sing with the
minstrels, “which delighted him greatly,” while from time to time
he glanced up at the lookout on the mast who was watching for
sight of the Spaniards. Needless to say, when sighted, they were met
and conquered, conrming Edward’s boast to be “Lord of the Sea.”
From Calais in 1359 the English set our for Reims, where Edward
intended to be crowned King of France. Trailing an enormous
baggage train said to cover two leagues, they crossed Picardy in
three separate lines of march in order to spread their foraging, and
even so found scant provisions in a country already devastated by
the companies Horses starved, pace slowed, rain fell daily, progress
contracted to three leagues a day. Worst of all, Edward’s goal of
decisive battle eluded him. The English marched through a
deliberately created vacuum. No glittering armed force came out to
meet them. The French concentrated their defense in fortied towns
and castles that could withstand attack.
Avoidance of pitched battle—the strategy that was to save France
—evolved, like most military innovations, from defeat, ignominy,
and paucity of means. The person who perceived what the situation
demanded was the Regent, a ruler who harkened to necessity, not
glory.
In respect of his hostile brother-in-law of Navarre, the Regent’s
position had improved, because in August Charles of Navarre had
deserted his alliance with Edward and, in yet one more elaborate
ceremony of reconciliation, promised to be “a good friend to the
King of France, to the Regent and the kingdom.” Though his
promise was widely thought to be inspired by God, the King of
Navarre could not live without plotting, and within months was
engaged in a new plan to dispose of the Dauphin.
Edward reached Reims in the rst week of December, presumably
expecting the city to admit him after what was to have been his
victorious advance. Forewarned of his intention, Reims had been
strengthening its walls during the long preparation and remained
stubbornly closed, forcing the English into a siege. The French had
emptied the countryside of everything that could serve the enemy
and had destroyed buildings that could shelter him. At the gates of

Reims, Edward saw the monastery of St. Thierry, which he had
intended to use as his headquarters, burning before his eyes. Foiled
of provisions as they had been of battle, and reduced by cold and
hunger, the English were forced to lift the siege after forty days.
They headed south for the rich land of Burgundy, looting and
destroying for two months until Edward allowed himself to be
bought o for 200,000 moutons d’or by the then Duke of Burgundy,
Philip de Rouvre.
As he turned toward Paris in March, Edward learned with fury
and vows of vengeance of a savage French raid carried out in that
month on Winchelsea, on the south coast of England. Its ultimate
object was the rescue of King Jean, which would have spared France
his ruinous ransom. As originally planned, the raid was also
intended, by “making a show of remaining there,” to frighten the
English into withdrawing forces from France in self-defense. Costs
were raised by the major towns. A bold ship captain named
Enguerrand Ringois of Abbeville, renowned for his courage and
indomitable character at the siege of Calais, was chosen as naval
commander. The land forces, numbering 2,000 knights, archers, and
foot soldiers from Picardy and Normandy, suered from the usual
absence of single command. They were led by a triumvirate of
nobles who were at odds with each other. Pierre des Essars, the man
who had disposed of Etienne Marcel, led a body of Parisian
volunteers.
Rumor preceding the attack had caused Jean to be moved on
March 1 from Lincolnshire to a castle nearer London and
subsequently to the Tower of London itself. Despite reconnoitering
of the coasts, the French, misled by false information, landed on the
south coast on March 15. Seizing Winchelsea without diculty,
they made no eort to establish a foothold, but plunged into the
usual frenzy of pillage, murder, and rape, including massacre of a
group of citizens attending mass in the church. While alarm ew
over the countryside, the French sacked the neighboring town of
Rye, then met and repelled a hastily assembled force of 1,200
English who came against them. Fearing greater reinforcements,
they decided against the “show of remaining there” and, returning

to the beachhead after a 48 hours’ invasion, re-embarked in the
light of the burning town.
England was thrown into a panic by news that the enemy were
“riding over the country, slaying, burning, destroying and doing
other mischief,” and that worse might be expected “unless they be
speedily and manfully opposed.” While that proved unnecessary, the
panic left a persistent fear of invasion that was to exert some
restraint on future activities against France. Otherwise the raid,
bravely planned and badly led, accomplished nothing except to
provoke Edward’s wrath and reprisals on discovering that the
French could act as viciously in his realm as the English did in
France.
Surrounding Paris early in April, the English sent heralds to
challenge the defenders to battle, but the Dauphin, relying on
Marcel’s improved fortications, forbade any response. After a week
of burning and killing outside the walls failed to provoke a ght,
Edward turned away, baed as he had been at Reims, though not
yet ready to give up. He took the road for Chartres, not for the
coast. For the past two months papal legates had been shuttling
between the Dauphin and the English, attempting to reopen
negotiations, always blocked by Edward’s refusal to reduce his
terms. The Dauphin himself had sent envoys with peace proposals.
Seeing “how the realm could not long endure the great tribulation
and poverty” the English were inicting, “for the rents of the lords
and churches were nigh lost in every part,” he and his Council
oered to settle on the basis agreed to in 1358 before Edward had
raised his demands. The Duke of Lancaster advised Edward to
accept, for if he persisted he might have to make war “all the days
of your life” and might “lose in one day what it has taken us twenty
years to win.”
The anger of the heavens supported the Duke. On Monday, April
13, a “foul dark day” of mist and bitter cold, as the army camped on
the approach to Chartres, a violent hailstorm struck with the force
of a cyclone, followed by cloudbursts of freezing rain. Horses and
men were killed by the prodigious hailstones, tents were torn up by
the wind, the baggage train was dragged through mud and oods,

and scores died of the fearful cold, “wherefor unto thys day manye
men callen it Black Monday.” In half an hour Edward’s army took a
beating that human hands could not have inicted and that could
hardly be taken as other than a celestial warning. Black Monday
brought to a head all the faults of the six months’ campaign—the
vulnerability of the English army, the foiling of decisive battle, the
incapacity to take a major walled town or capital city, the vaguely
perceived knowledge, of which Lancaster had a glimmer, that
France could not be conquered by pillage, nor by siege, town by
town, fortress by fortress. In the long run, this was what would
condemn the war to drag on for a hundred years—the fact that,
short of a uke like the capture of a king at Poitiers, medieval
armies had no means of achieving a decisive result, much less
unconditional surrender.
Yielding to Heaven’s warning and Lancaster’s counsel, Edward
appointed commissioners to treat with the French on revised peace
terms. They met at the little village of Brétigny about a league’s
distance from Chartres, where the twenty years’ war was at last
brought to an end-as it then seemed.
Signed May 8, 1360, the Treaty of Brétigny covered a maze of
legal and territorial details in 39 articles, ve letters of
conrmation, and multiple rhetoric as eternal as lawyers. Basically
it was a return to the original settlement of 1358. King Jean’s
ransom was put back to 3 million gold écus and Edward’s excess
territorial demands were abandoned, to that extent marking his last
campaign as a failure and a waste. But the basic cession of Guienne
and Calais to the King of England free of homage was conrmed,
plus the transfer of other territories, towns, ports, and castles
between the Loire and the Pyrenees and in the region of Calais,
representing in all about a third of France, the largest gain ever
recorded in western Europe up to that time. Edward renounced the
crown of France and all territorial claims not granted in the treaty.
To ensure fulllment, the earlier provision for forty hostages
representing the greatest in the realm was renewed, again including
Enguerrand de Coucy. As lord of the greatest stronghold in northern
France and a center of resistance to the English, he was deliberately

selected in the belief that the peace would be better kept if such
men were hostages.
The group was headed by the four “Fleurs-de-Lys” or royal princes
—namely, the King’s two sons, Louis and Jean (future Ducs d’Anjou
and de Berry); his brother, the Duc d’Orléans; and the Dauphin’s
brother-in-law, Louis II, Duc de Bourbon. The Counts d’Artois, d’Eu,
de Longueville, d’Alençon, de Blois, de St. Pol, d’Harcourt, de
Grandpré, de Braisne, and other grands seigneurs and notable ghters
including Matthieu de Roye, Coucy’s former guardian, made up the
list. King Jean was to be returned as far as Calais, where he would
remain until a rst payment of 600,000 écus was made on his
ransom and a preliminary transfer of territories had taken place. He
would then be liberated with ten of his fellow prisoners from
Poitiers and replaced by forty hostages of the Third Estate—the real
source of money—four from Paris and two from each of eighteen
other towns. Thereafter, sovereignty of towns and castles was to be
transferred, and the remainder of the ransom paid, 400,000 at a
time, in six installments at six-month intervals, with one fth of the
hostages released upon each delivery.
The Treaty of Brétigny was “too lightly given to the great grief
and prejudice of the kingdom of France” in the judgment of the
anonymous chronicler of the Quatre Valois, of whom nothing is
known except that he was a citizen of Rouen. Fortresses and good
towns were given up, he wrote, that “could not have easily been
conquered,” which was true enough, but the treaty was excused on
the ground that it was necessary to deliver the King.
Delivering France from the companies was even more urgent. In
an appendix to the treaty, Edward forbade on pain of banishment
any further acts against the peace by English men of war, but there
was no rm intent behind the provision and it brought France no
surcease. In fact the Treaty of Brétigny opened the period of the
companies’ greatest ourishing, as a swarm of newly discharged
soldiers in groups labeled the Tard-Venus (Late-Comers) scavenged
on the heels of their predecessors and gradually swelled the ranks of
the mercenary armies.

Eorts to raise the ransom were stretched to the extreme. Towns,
counties, and noble domains assessed themselves, among them the
house of Coucy, which contributed 27,500 francs. Sales taxes of
twelve pence in the pound were levied on Paris and the surrounding
country, to be paid by nobles and clergy and “all persons capable of
paying.” When returns were meager, recourse was had to the Jews,
who were invited back on a grant of twenty years’ residence for
which they were to pay twenty orins each on re-entry and seven
orins annually thereafter.
Jean himself sold his eleven-year-old daughter Isabelle in
marriage to the nine-year-old son of the rich and rampant Visconti
family of Milan for 600,000 gold orins. The alliance of the King of
France with an upstart Italian tyrant was almost as great a wonder
as the defeat of Poitiers. To obtain the princess, Galeazzo Visconti,
the bridegroom’s father, oered half the money cash down and half
in return for a territorial dowry. The marriage was to take place in
July, immediately following betrothal as was customary, but had to
be postponed when the princess fell ill of a fever. What anxiety must
have hovered over a daughter’s sickbed, on which so much gold
depended!
At that time the plague had re-appeared what was to be a major
recurrence in the following year. After escaping to country villas for
the summer months while thousands died in Milan and corpses
rotted in sealed houses, the Visconti brothers returned as the plague
abated, and sent throughout Italy for jewels, silks, and gorgeous
raiment in preparation of the wedding. Guests were assured it
“would be the greatest that Lombardy had ever seen.” The French
princess, having recovered, was dispatched to Milan via Savoy
regardless of risk, and duly married in mid-October in festivities of
“imperial” luxury lasting three days. A thousand guests with all
their retainers converged upon the city for the occasion. The opulent
show put on by the Visconti—and paid for by their subjects—only
underlined what was widely seen as a humiliation for France. “Who
could imagine,” wrote Matteo Villani, considering the greatness of
the crown of France, “that the wearer of that crown should be
reduced to such straits as virtually to sell his own esh at auction?”

The fate of the King’s daughter seemed to him “truly an indication
of the infelicity of human aairs.”
King Jean meanwhile had been waiting in English custody at
Calais since July along with his youngest son, now called Philip the
Bold. The surname of the future Duke of Burgundy was earned at a
banquet given by King Edward for the prisoners of Poitiers, in the
course of which the young prince jumped up from the table in a fury
and struck the master butler, crying, “Where did you learn to serve
the King of England before the King of France when they are at the
same table?” “Verily, cousin,” commented Edward, “you are Philip
the Bold.” In 1361, on the death of Philip de Rouvre, King Jean took
over the duchy of Burgundy for his youngest son who was to make
it a fateful inheritance.
On October 24, 1360, a rst payment of 400,000 écus on Jean’s
ransom, collected mostly in the north, was delivered to the English
at Calais. The Visconti gold was so entangled in complex nancial
deals, dowries, and exchanges between Jean and Galeazzo that it
seems not to have assisted the ransom. Though less than the
stipulated sum, the 400,000 was accepted, and the peace treaty,
with some modications, thereupon formally ratied as the Treaty
of Calais. The signature of Enguerrand de Coucy as one of the chief
hostages was added to the document. After jointly swearing with
Edward to keep the peace perpetually according to the terms of the
treaty, the two Kings parted, and Jean after four years’
imprisonment returned at last to his ravaged country.
Four days after his liberation, on October 30, the party of French
hostages in the custody of King Edward and his sons sailed for
England. Some were to stay for ten years, some to return in two or
three, some to die in exile. Among their varying fates, Enguerrand’s
was unique: he was to become the son-in-law of the King of
England.
Immortality traveled with him across the Channel. Whether on
the same ship or another of the convoy, a young clerk of bourgeois
family from Valenciennes in Hainault was journeying to England to
present an account he had written of the Battle of Poitiers to Queen
Philippa of England, his countrywoman, in hopes of obtaining her

patronage. By name Jean Froissart, aged 22 or 23, he succeeded in
pleasing the Queen and, with her encouragement, began collecting
material for the chronicle that was to make him the Herodotus of
his age. Consciously the celebrator of chivalry, he wrote with intent
that “the honorable and noble adventures and feats of arms, done
and achieved by the wars of France and England, should notably be
inregistered and put in perpetual memory.” Within those connes,
no more complete and vivid chronicle exists. Crystallized in the
“perpetual memory” Froissart achieved for them, the nobles of his
time forever ride, brilliant, avaricious, valiant, cruel. If, as Sir
Walter Scott complained, Froissart had “marvelous little sympathy”
for the “villain churls,” that was a condition of the context.
The convoy carrying the hostages contained an extraordinary
concentration of the primary actors of the day. Among them was
another observer who had immortality to bestow. Humanity was
Georey Chaucer’s subject, and all of 14th century society—except
the lowest—his scope. Twenty years old at this time, born in the
same year as Enguerrand de Coucy, he had accompanied the English
army to France as a member of the household of the King’s second
son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence. While in a foraging party outside
Reims, he had been captured by the French and ransomed by King
Edward for £16, which compared favorably with the £6 13s. 4d.
paid in compensation for Lord Andrew Lutterall’s dead horse and
with the £2 paid to ransom the average archer. No documentary
evidence attests to Chaucer’s presence on the return voyage to
England, but since the Duke of Clarence sailed with the hostages, it
is more than likely that Chaucer, as a member of his retinue,
accompanied him.
In due time Coucy was to meet and know Chaucer and become a
friend and patron of Froissart, although there is nothing to show
whether the three young men made contact during the voyage.
Some time afterward, however, while eagerly observing everyone
who might be material for his history, Froissart took notice of his
future patron. At a court festivity in England when elaborate dances
and singing preceded the banquet, he observed how “the young lord
de Coucy shined in dancing and caroling whenever it was his turn.

He was in great favor with both the French and English, for
whatever he chose to do he did well and with grace and all praised
him for the agreeable manner in which he addressed everyone.” In
the talents that a stylish young nobleman was supposed to show,
Enguerrand was clearly an accomplished performer who, not
surprisingly, attracted attention.
Pursuit of adventures under Mars and Venus was supposed to be
the business of a young knight’s life. “If at arms you excel,” advises
the God of Love in the Roman de la Rose, “you will be ten times
loved. If you have a good voice, seek no excuse when asked to sing,
for good singing gives pleasure.” Dancing and playing the ute and
strings also aid the lover on his way to a lady’s heart. He should
likewise keep his hands, nails, and teeth clean, lace his sleeves,
comb his hair, but use no paint or rouge, which are not tting even
for women. He should dress handsomely and fashionably and wear
fresh new shoes, taking care that they t so well that “common folk
will discuss how you got them on and where you entered them.” He
should nish o with a garland of owers, which costs little.
How far Enguerrand conformed to this ideal cannot be said, for
no portrait exists, which is not exceptional since, except for royal
personages, the art of portraiture was hardly yet practiced. The 14th
century seems to have been interested in individual appearance and
character traits only in the case of ruling gures or an occasional
oddity like Bertrand Du Guesclin. Other people are undierentiated
by chronicles and illustrators and become personalities only through
their deeds. For Enguerrand de Coucy two clues to appearance exist;
one that he was tall and strong, as his gure was described under a
rain of blows in his last battle; the other that he may have been dark
and, in maturity, saturnine, as he appears in a portrait painted more
than 200 years after his death. Since the portrait was commissioned
by a Celestine monastery which Enguerrand had founded, some
tradition of the founder’s looks may have survived to instruct the
artist, but the face portrayed could just as well have been
imaginary.

The most vivid description of all is non-specic; yet in his singing
and dancing, elegant horsemanship, charm of manner, and lover’s
talents, it is impossible not to see the young Enguerrand de Coucy in
the Squire of the Canterbury Tales. Which is not to say that Chaucer,
who saw knights and squires every day during his career at court,
had Enguerrand particularly in mind when he drew the sparkling
portrait in the Prologue. Nevertheless it ts.
A lovyere and a lusty bacheler
With lokkes crulled [curled] as they were leyd in presse,
Of twenty yeer of age he was, I gesse.
Of his stature he was of evene lengthe,
And wonderly deliver, and great of strengthe.
And he had been sometime in chevachye,
In Flaundres, in Artoys, and Picardye,
And born him wel, as of so litel space,
In hope to stonden in his lady grace.
Embroudered was he as it were a mede
Al ful of fresshe oures whyte and rede.
Singing he was or oytinge [uting] all the day;
He was as fresh as is the month of May.
Short was his goune, with sieves long and wyde.
Wel coude he sitte on hors and faire ryde.
He coude songes make and wel endyte,
Jouste and eek daunce, and wel purtreye and wryte.
So hote he lovede that by nightertale [nighttime]
He sleep namore than dooth a nightingale.
Headed by the four “Lilies,” Anjou, Berry, Orléans, and Bourbon,
the hostages in their silks and parti-colors, “embroidered like a eld
of owers,” brought no less splendor to England than the prisoners
of Poitiers whom they replaced. They were required to live at their
own expense—considerable in the case of the Duc d’Orléans, who
had sixteen servants with him and a total retinue of over sixty.
Handsomely entertained with banquets and minstrels and gifts of
jewels, the hostages moved about freely and joined in hunting and

hawking, dancing and irting. French and English chivalry took
pride in treating one another courteously as prisoners, however
greedy the ransom—in contrast to Germans, who, according to
Froissart’s scornful report, threw their prisoners “in chains and irons
like thieves and murderers to extort a greater ransom.”
Coucy would not have felt alien in England. His family possessed
lands there inherited from his great-grandmother Catherine de
Baliol, although these had been conscated during the war by King
Edward and handed over as a municent reward to the captor of the
King of Scotland.
English and French, like English and Americans of a later day,
shared a common culture and, among nobles, a common language,
the legacy of the Norman Conquest. At about the time the hostages
arrived, the use of French by the upper class was beginning to be
replaced by the national speech of the commoners. Before the Black
Death, French had been the language of the court, Parliament, and
the lawcourts. King Edward himself probably did not speak English
with any uency. French was even taught in the schools, much to
the resentment of the bourgeois, whose children, according to a
complaint of 1340, “are Compelled to leave the use of their own
language, a thing which is known in no other country.” When many
clerics who could teach French were eliminated by the Black Death,
children in the grammar schools began learning their lessons in
English—with both prot and loss, in the opinion of John of
Trevisa. They learned grammar more quickly than before, he wrote,
but, lacking French, they were at a disadvantage when they “scholle
passe the se and travayle in strange londes.”
Because of its island limits and earlier development of
parliamentary power, England was more cohesive than France, with
a greater national feeling, enhanced by growing antagonism to the
papacy. Now with the ransoms of two kings, Jean of France and
David of Scotland, the triumphs in battle and the territorial gains,
England had turned the tables on William the Conqueror. Yet
beneath the pride and glory and ow of cash, the eects of war
were gnawing at the country.

The plunderers of France brought home the habit of brigandage.
Many in the invasion forces had been outlaws and criminals to
begin with who had joined up for a promised pardon. Others were
made lawless and violent by the approved daily practice in France.
Returning home, some formed companies in imitation of their
fellows who had stayed in France. “Arrayed as for war,” they robbed
and assaulted travelers, took captives, held villages for ransom,
killed, mutilated, and spread terror. A statute of 1362 instructed
justices to gather information “on all those who have been
plunderers and robbers beyond the seas and are now returned to go
wandering and will not work as they were used to do.”
In the spring of 1361, twelve years since the passing of the great
plague, the dreaded black swellings reappeared in France and
England, bringing “a very great mortality of hasty death.” An early
victim was the Queen of France, Jean’s second wife, who died in
September 1360 ahead of the main epidemic. The Pestis Secunda,
sometimes called the “mortality of children,” took a particularly
high toll of the young, who had no immunity from the earlier
outbreak, and, according to John of Reading, “especially struck the
masculine sex.” The deaths of the young in the Second Pest halted
repopulation, haunting the age with a sense of decline. In the urge
to procreate, women in England, according to Polychronicon, “took
any kind of husbands, strangers, the feeble and imbeciles alike, and
without shame mated with inferiors.”
Because the pneumonic form was absent or insignicant, the
death rate as a whole was less than that of the rst epidemic,
although equally erratic. In Paris 70 to 80 died daily; at Argenteuil,
a few miles away where the Oise joins the Seine, the number of
hearths was reduced from 1,700 to 50. Flanders and Picardy
suered heavily, and Avignon spectacularly. Through its choked and
unsanitary quarters the plague swept like ames through straw.
Between March and July 1360 “17,000” were said to have died.
Though less lethal, the Second Pest carried a more terrible burden
than the rst in the very fact of its return. Thereafter people lived in
fear, repeatedly justied, of another recurrence, just as they lived in
fear of the brigands’ return. At any time either the phantom that

“rises like black smoke in our midst” or the steel-capped horsemen
could appear, with death and ruin at their heels. A sense of
overhanging disaster weighed on the second half of the century,
expressed in prophecies of doom and apocalypse.
The most celebrated of these was the “Tribulation” of Jean de la
Roquetaillade, a Franciscan friar incarcerated at Avignon because of
his preaching against corrupt prelates and princes. Like Jean de
Venette, he sympathized with the oppressed against the mighty, lay
and clerical. From his cell in 1356, the year of Poitiers, he
prophesied that France would be brought low and all Christendom
be vexed by troubles: tyranny and robbers would prevail; the lowly
would rise against the great, who “shall be cruelly slain by the
commons”; many women would be “deled and widowed” and their
“haughtiness and luxury shall wither”; Saracens and Tatars would
invade the kingdoms of the Latins; rulers and peoples, outraged by
the luxury and pride of the clergy, would combine to strip the
Church of its property; nobles and princes would be cast down from
their dignities and suer unbelievable aictions; Anti-Christ would
appear to spread false doctrines; tempests, oods, and plagues
would wipe out most of mankind and all hardened sinners,
preparing the way for renewal.
These were the concerns and real currents of the time. Like most
medieval doom-sayers, however, Roquetaillade predicted debacle as
the prelude to a better world. In his vision, the Church, puried by
suering, chastisement, and true poverty, would be restored, a great
reformer would become Pope, the King of France against all custom
would be elected Holy Roman Emperor and rule as the holiest
monarch since the beginning of time. He and the Pope together
would expel the Saracens and Tatars from Europe, convert all
Moslems, Jews, and other indels, destroy heresy, conquer the
world for the universal church, and, before they died, establish a
reign of peace that would last a thousand years until the Day of
Judgment and the End.

The hostages did not escape the plague. A high-ranking victim
was Count Guy de St. Pol, a knight of great virtue, “very devout and
merciful to the poor,” who abhorred the lusts and corruptions of the
world, fasted unsparingly, and had maintained virginity until
agreeing to marriage. The bourgeois hostages of Paris, Rouen, and
several other towns were likewise victims. The great Duke of
Lancaster, probably the richest man in the kingdom, was not proof;
he too died of the plague, leaving his title and vast inheritance to
his son-in-law, John of Gaunt, third son of King Edward. How and
where the hostages were housed and whether chivalric courtesy
allowed them escape to country retreats is not recorded. In 1357,
eight years after the rst plague, London was reported still one-third
empty, but, though uncrowded, its sanitation was still careless
enough to elicit repeated ordinances requiring citizens to clean their
premises. Though it was against the law to empty chamber pots into
the streets, their contents and kitchen garbage were often ung out
of windows, more or less aimed at the gutters, which carried a
steady current of water. Barns for keeping horses, cattle, pigs, and
chickens were located inside the walls as well as outside, causing
many complaints about accumulating piles of manure. At about this
time London’s aldermen organized a system of hired “rakers” to
carry the piles away in dump carts or in dung boats on the Thames.
For the hostages, prospects were not carefree. Their hope of
return depended on regular payments of the King’s ransom, which
already lagged. Collection of money was slowed by the plague and
was anyway hard to come by in the ashes left by the companies. The
case of Buxeaul, a town in Burgundy, was typical of many.
According to a royal ordinance of 1361, plague and massacre had
reduced its fty or sixty hearths to ten and these “have been
pillaged and ruined by our enemies so that little or nothing remains
to them wherefore some of the inhabitants have left the place and
are still leaving from day to day”; and because of these things, the
survivors if required to pay customary taxes “would have to ee and
leave the place and become poor beggars”; therefore it was ordained

that the town should pay one tax a year instead of two and be freed
of all heriot.
The desolation of churches sacked by the enemy was a subject of
constant appeals to the bishops. Candles cannot be lit at mass
because the winds blow through for lack of window glass; collapse
threatens without funds for maintenance; roofs leak, rain falls on the
altar. Abbots and abbesses wander in search of subsistence; prelates
who would have blushed to appear in public without retinues of
horsemen and servants “are now under the necessity of going on
foot in humiliation followed by a single monk or valet and
subsisting on the most frugal diet.” Universities suered from lack
of attendance and fees. Montpellier declared itself “destitute of
lecturers and auditors because in the said Studium where formerly a
thousand students used to dwell, scarcely 200 are to be found
today.”
To the shocked eyes of Petrarch, sent by Galeazzo Visconti to
congratulate King Jean on his liberation, France was “a heap of
ruins.” Petrarch was an inveterate complainer who raised every
complaint to an extremity, whether it was the iniquity of doctors,
the smells of Avignon, or the decadence of the papacy. But even if
exaggerated, his account of France as he saw it in January 1361 was
tragic enough. “Everywhere was solitude, desolation and misery;
elds are deserted, houses ruined and empty except in the walled
towns; everywhere you see the fatal footprints of the English and
the hateful scars still bleeding from their swords.” In royal Paris,
“shamed by devastation up to her very gates … even the Seine ows
sadly as if feeling the sorrow of it, and weeps, trembling for the fate
of the whole land.”
Petrarch presented the King with two rings from Galeazzo, one a
huge ruby as a gift, one torn from Jean’s hand at Poitiers which
Galeazzo had somehow redeemed. Afterward he treated the court to
a Latin oration on the Biblical text of Manasseh’s return from
Babylon, with felicitous references to the mutability of Fortune as
shown by Jean’s marvelous restoration out of captivity. The King
and the Prince, Petrarch wrote in the voluminous correspondence of
which he carefully kept copies, “xed their eyes on me” with great

interest, and he felt that his discussion of Fortune especially aroused
the attention of the Dauphin, “a young man of ardent intelligence.”
Personal misfortunes, apart from those of his country, had
aicted the Dauphin. In October 1360 his three-year-old daughter,
Jeanne, and her infant sister, Bonne, his only children, had died
within two weeks of each other, though whether of the plague, like
the Queen, is not stated. At the double burial the Dauphin was seen
“so sorrowful as never before he had been.” He himself had been
aicted by an illness which caused his hair and nails to fall out and
rendered him “dry as a stick.” Gossip attributed it to poison
administered by Charles of Navarre, which it may well have been,
for the symptoms are those of arsenic poisoning. The King of
Navarre had once again turned inimical. In December 1359 when
the English were at Reims, perhaps fearing that Edward might
indeed gain the crown, he had plotted a coup of his own. Armed
men were to enter Paris by several gates, combine forces to seize the
Louvre, enter and kill the Dauphin and his Council, then spread
through the city, seizing strong points before the Parisians could
assemble. His ultimate purpose as usual remains mysterious.
Betrayed to the Dauphin, the plot fractured relations between them
and left Charles of Navarre prowling in hostility as before.
Not only payment of the ransom but fulllment of the territorial
terms controlled the hostages’ fate. Too lightly, as the chronicler
said, sovereignties had been disposed of at Brétigny, with no
account taken of the fact that territories on paper represented
people on the ground. Something had happened to these people
during two decades of war. The citizens of the seaport of La
Rochelle implored the King not to give them up, saying they would
rather be taxed up to half their property every year than be turned
over to English rule. “We may submit to the English with our lips,”
they said, “but with our hearts never.” Weeping, the inhabitants of
Cahors lamented that the King had left them orphans. The little
town of St. Romain de Tarn refused to admit the English
commissioners within its gates, although it reluctantly sent envoys
to take the oath of homage next day at a neighboring place.

For all his countrymen who equated the English with the brigands
and hated them helplessly in their hearts, Enguerrand Ringois of
Abbeville, the naval commander of the raid on Winchelsea, spoke
through his acts. As citizen of a ceded town, he adamantly refused
to take the oath of allegiance to the King of England. Persisting
against all threats, he was transferred to England, held in a dungeon
without recourse to law or friends, and nally taken to the clis of
Dover, where he was given the choice between taking the oath or
death on the wave-washed rocks below. Ringois threw himself into
the sea.
Like Pope Boniface’s claim to total papal supremacy, the terms of
Brétigny were obsolete. It was too late to transfer provinces of
France like simple efs; unnoticed, the inhabitants had come to feel
themselves French. Between the happening of a historical process
and its recognition by rulers, a lag stretches, full of pitfalls.
The fate of the hostages was caught up in it. With the ransom in
arrears and trouble arising over the ceded territories, their exile
stretched ahead to no visible horizon. They were not being returned
in xed numbers every six months as planned, nor being replaced
by substitutes, because few could be found willing to go and Edward
made diculties over the names proposed. In November 1362 the
four impatient royal Dukes, who had expected to be released a year
earlier, negotiated a treaty of their own with Edward by which they
promised to deliver 200,000 orins due on the ransom and certain
additional territories belonging to the Duc d’Orléans in return for
their freedom and that of six other hostages. They were to stay in
Calais on parole until delivery had been fullled. Never averse to
taking a little extra, Edward was willing to let them go on these
terms, but King Jean insistently refused his consent unless his cousin
the Comte d’Alençon, the Comte d’Auvergne, and the Sire de Coucy
were released in place of three of those named by the “Lilies.” Since
Jean’s choices were greater nobles than the other three, Edward in
his turn refused consent. Correspondence owed, the royal Dukes
dispatched urgent and angry appeals, nally King Jean, who had by
now left his unhappy country for Avignon, lost interest and yielded.
Coucy as a result remained in England. More than ever, after the

departure of the royal Dukes, he was the object of Edward’s and his
daughter’s interest.
Events took a startling turn when King Jean himself, for whose
recovery his country had sacriced so much, voluntarily returned to
captivity in England. The motivations of this curious monarch are
not readily understood 600 years later; only the train of
circumstance is clear.
On regaining the throne, King Jean’s rst eort to cope with his
country’s tormentors proved to be another Poitiers in miniature. To
stem the “Great Company” of Tard-Venus who were overrunning
central France, he had hired one of their own kind, the “Archpriest,”
Arnaut de Cervole, and, in addition, dispatched a small royal army
of 200 knights and 400 archers under the Count of Tancarville,
lieutenant of the region, and the renowned Jacques de Bourbon,
Count de la Marche, a great-grandson of St. Louis, who had saved
King Philip’s life at Crécy. Both had been wounded and captured at
Poitiers without having their appetite for oensive warfare in the
least diminished. On April 6, 1362, against the advice of Arnaut de
Cervole, the two valorous knights ordered an attack at Brignais, a
height held by the Tard-Venus near Lyon. The brigands let loose an
avalanche of stones upon the royal host, cracking helmets and
armor, felling horses, and shattering the attack as the English
archers had done at Poitiers. Then on foot, with shortened lances,
they nished o the business. Jacques de Bourbon and with him his
eldest son and his nephew were killed, and the Count of Tancarville
and many other rich nobles captured and held for ransom.
Otherwise the brigands made no use of their victory other than to
continue brigandage. Lyon purchased artillery, strengthened its
walls, and maintained guards with lanterns at night; the countryside
suered as before.
The King’s response to Brignais was to leave for Avignon, where
he was to stay for nearly a year. Amid military chaos and every
other aiction of his realm, his purpose in going was to resume the
crusade that had been broken o twenty years ago by the Anglo-
French war. Though he could neither protect his own land, raise his
ransom, nor redeem the fty to sixty hostages who stood for him in

exile, he felt concerned to redeem his father’s unfullled vow to
take the cross. Froissart gives him the realistic motive of intending
by the crusade to draw out of his realm the pillaging companies, but
adds oddly that he “preserved this purpose and intent to himself.”
Perhaps Jean genuinely considered crusade the proper role of the
“Most Christian King”; perhaps he saw it compensating for his
recent humiliations; perhaps France’s troubles were too much for
him and he wanted an excuse to get away.
The King also had in mind a project of uniting to France the
territory of Provence—which included Avignon—by marrying its
Countess, Joanna, Queen of Naples, the most complicated heiress of
the century. Halfway through an active connubial career, she was at
this time twice a widow, once, as widely believed, by her own hand.
Since Naples was a ef of the papacy, her marriage had to be
approved by the Pope. As a Frenchman, Innocent VI was expected to
be amenable.
Jean’s other project, crusade, was the supreme goal of this earnest
and pious Pope who, for its sake, had tried so persistently to make
peace between France and England. Worn out by ten years of
discord and struggle to curb the worldliness of prelates, and nally
by plague and brigands, Innocent died in September 1362, while
Jean was on his way to Avignon. His successor, Urban V, though
also a French native, saw the absorption of Provence by France as a
threat to papal independence and disapproved the marriage. But he
preached the crusade, actively supported by the titular King of
Jerusalem, Pierre de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, who had arrived in
Avignon to promote it.
The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem by this time was no more than a
memory; the last European settlers of Syria had retreated to Cyprus,
and Europeans now came only to trade. When commerce with
Moslems ourished, zeal for their massacre declined. Holy war had
lost its thrust with the lessening of European unity, with too
frequent use of crusade against internal heretics, and lately with loss
of population in the plague. The indel, like the heretic, was still
feared by Christianity as a gure of genuine menace. Crusade still
had its devout propagandists, but as a common impulse the zeal had

faded. For the Church it had become largely a device for raising
money; for nobles and kings the tradition survived as part of the
chivalric code and had recently received a new impulse from the
threat of the Turks on the shores of Europe. The diculty was that
crusade now suered from the same necessity as the state: no longer
composed of self-nanced volunteers, it required paid armies and
money to pay them.
The Kings of Cyprus and France spent all winter and spring at
Avignon discussing possibilities with the Pope. On Good Friday the
crusade was proclaimed. Jean was named Captain-General and took
the cross along with the Count of Tancarville and other companions
of the recent battering at Brignais. That marked the peak of the
enterprise. King Edward, on being visited by the King of Cyprus,
excused himself “graciously and right sagely,” and after arousing no
greater response at other courts of Europe, the King of Cyprus was
forced to let crusade lapse for the present.
Having failed in his projects at Avignon, Jean was obliged to face
the unpleasantness of home. He rode through his distressed realm at
a leisurely pace, reaching Paris in July 1363. Here he found that the
Regent and Council had disallowed the private treaty between the
royal hostages and Edward, on the grounds that it gave too much
away. Worse, the Duc d’Anjou had absconded, breaking his parole.
Newly married before going as a hostage, he had gone to Boulogne
to meet his wife, with whom he was said to be much in love, and
refused to return to Calais. Jean considered his son’s act a “felony”
upon the honor of the crown. Combined with arrears in ransom,
cancellation of the “hostages’ ” treaty, to which he had assented,
and non-fulllment of other cessions, it brought his own honor into
disrepute and left him no way out, so he claimed, but to return to
captivity.
Even for the 14th century, this reasoning, in the face of political
realities, seemed extreme. Jean’s Council and the prelates and
barons of France “conseled him sore to the contrary” and told him
his plan was “a great folly,” but he insisted, saying that if “good
faith and honor were to be banished from the rest of the world, they

should still be found in the hearts and words of princes.” He
departed a week after Christmas, crossing the Channel in midwinter.
His going was an amazement to his contemporaries. Jean de
Venette, who loved neither kings nor nobles, suggested he went
back for “causa joci” (reasons of pleasure). Historians have oered
him every excuse: that he returned to avert war, or, counting on
personal relations, to persuade Edward to reduce the ransom, or
persuade him to call o the renewed hostilities of the King of
Navarre. If these were his reasons, none was accomplished. If it was
honor that took him back, what of kingship? What did he owe to the
kingdom that needed its sovereign, to the citizens who were being
squeezed of their last penny to pay his ransom, to the memory of
Ringois of Abbeville? Who can say what made Jean return? Perhaps
it was no medieval reason, but the human tragedy of a man who,
knowing himself inadequate for the task he was born to, sought the
enforced passivity of prison.
He arrived in London in January 1364, was greeted with lavish
entertainments and processions, fell ill of an “unknown malady” in
March, and died in April, aged 45. Edward gave him a magnicent
funeral service at St. Paul’s during which 4,000 torches each twelve
feet high and 3,000 candles each weighing ten pounds were
consumed. Afterward his body was returned to France for burial in
the royal basilica of St. Denis. King Jean had found the permanent
passivity of the grave.
A million orins were still owed on his ransom, leaving the
hostages unreleased. Some used the safe-conducts given them from
time to time and did not return, despite repeated summonses. Some
bought their freedom from Edward with shares of their own
territories. Others simply disappeared, by one means or another.
Anjou’s younger brother, Jean, Duc de Berry, managed so shrewdly
and made so many excuses while on leave that he retained liberty
and honor too. Matthieu de Roye, on the other hand, perhaps
because his reputation as a ghter kept him well guarded, was still a
hostage after twelve years. Enguerrand de Coucy was to be released
under special circumstances in 1365.

Chapter 9

I
Enguerrand and Isabella
sabella of England, second child and eldest daughter of King
Edward and Queen Philippa, was the favorite of her father,
whose marriage diplomacy on her behalf had ve times failed to
produce results. Since the last failure, when she was nineteen,
she had been allowed to live independently, an over-indulged,
willful, and wildly extravagant princess who was 33 in 1365, eight
years older than Enguerrand de Coucy.
As a baby she had lain in a state cradle, gilded and crested, lined
with taeta, and furnished with a coverlet made of 670 skins
although she was born in June. A special dressmaker appointed to
the infant made her a robe of Lucca silk with four rows of
“garnitures” edged with fur to wear at her mother’s relevailles, or
rst reception after the birth. The Queen for the occasion wore a
robe of red and purple velvet embroidered with pearls, and received
the court reclining on a state bed equipped with a gigantic spread of
green velvet measuring seven and one half by eight ells* and
embroidered with an all-over pattern of merman and mermaid
holding the shields of England and Hainault. All her ladies of the
chamber and the whole of her household, from chancellor and
treasurer down to kitchen maid, wore new clothes ordered for the
occasion. Ostentation was the duty of princes.
The rst three royal children—Edward, Isabella, and Joanna—had
their own household together, with their own chaplains, musicians,
a noble governor and governess, three waiting damsels for Isabella
and two for Joanna, a sta of esquires, clerks of pantry and butlery,
chief cook, valets of larder and kitchen, valets de chambre, water-
carriers, candle-bearers, porters, grooms, and other attendants. They
were served on silver, slept on silk-upholstered beds, and had fur-
trimmed robes of scarlet and gray cloth with buttons of gold and

silver thread. Their wardrobes were replenished for state festivities
and at Christmas, Easter, and All Saints’ Day, when all who could
aord to wore new clothes. When Isabella and Joanna rode their
palfreys from London to Westminster, each led by a valet at the
bridle, their almoners walked alongside, distributing alms to the
poor and to the prisoners of Newgate. For their attendance at a
tournament when they were aged ten and nine, eighteen workmen
were employed for nine days to embroider their robes under the
supervision of the King’s armor-bearer, using eleven ounces of gold
leaf in the process. The material life of the 14th century survives in
the diligent bookkeeping, itemized down to the minutest transaction
on parchment rolls.
At the age of twelve Isabella’s favored position was marked by her
having seven ladies-in-waiting compared to Joanna’s three. All
seven, with Isabella, are reported arriving in Canterbury for a
tournament in 1349 during the Black Death, wearing masks,
presumably against contagion, although these did not help to
prevent the death of her favorite attendant, Lady de Throxford.
Curiously undeterred by the plague, the court held the elaborate
ceremonial of the Order of the Garter as usual in 1349, with the
Queen, Isabella, and 300 ladies present at the jousts and festivities.
Ladies of the Garter wore the same robes as the men, embroidered
with blue and silver garters and the Order’s motto, and furnished to
them annually at royal expense.
When Isabella was three years old, the King had proposed her
marriage to Pedro, son of the King of Castile, but negotiations fell
through, perhaps fortunately because the prospective bridegroom
was later to win unpleasant renown as Pedro the Cruel. Replacing
her sister, Joanna was on her way to marry this prince when she
died of the plague at Bordeaux in 1348. A second match for Isabella
with the son of the Duke of Brabant was held up owing to
consanguinity, and while the Pope was considering dispensation,
she was betrothed instead to the reluctant Louis of Flanders and all
but reached the altar before the celebrated jilting. Two years later
King Edward failed to bring o a match with Charles IV of Bohemia,
the elected but not yet consecrated Emperor, then a widower.

Then came the episode of Isabella’s retaliation. In 1351 when she
was nineteen, the King announced her coming marriage to Bérard
d’Albret, son of Bernard-Ezi, Sire d’Albret, a great lord of Gascony
and Edward’s chief lieutenant there. Whether the choice was the
King’s or his daughter’s is moot. Though not a ruling family, the
d’Albrets were an extensive and powerful clan, straddling homage to
both England and France, whom Edward was disposed to keep
friendly. In the year of the betrothal he bestowed a pension of
£1,000 on Bernard-Ezi, recalling his loyal service in resisting both
“the threats and the blandishments” of the King of France.
While union with the d’Albrets for a king’s eldest daughter was no
diplomatic triumph, it was advantageous at a time when Edward
was doing everything to strengthen his hold on Guienne. He said as
much in the marriage announcement, which spoke of his desire “to
kindle in the lord of Albret and his posterity a closer attachment to
our royal house, and to bind them more intimately to us”—exactly
the motive that was to reappear in the case of Coucy. At the same
time, the King seemed reluctant to let Isabella go, describing her as
“our very dear eldest daughter whom we have loved with a special
aection.” In settling on her a portion of 4,000 marks and an annual
revenue of £1,000, he added the unusual provision—almost an
inducement to her to change her mind—that in case anything
prevented the marriage, the sums would revert not to the King, but
to Isabella herself.
To carry the princess and her retinue of knights and ladies to
Bordeaux, ve ships were ordered by the direct method of
furnishing a royal ocer with a warrant to arrest ve suitable
vessels in “all ports and places” from the mouth of the Thames
westward. The bride’s trousseau included robes of cloth of gold and
Tripoli silk and a mantle of Indian silk lined in ermine and
embroidered all over with leaves, doves, bears, and other devices
worked in silver and gold. For another robe of crimson velvet, the
elaborate embroidery fashionable at the time required thirteen days’
work by twenty men and nine women. For gifts, Isabella brought
119 chaplets made of silk entwined with pearls surmounted by a
golden Agnus Dei standing on a green velvet band wrought with

owers and leaves. But these marvelous contrivances were never to
be worn—or at least not as intended. At the water’s edge Isabella
changed her mind and came home. Was it desire to jilt as she had
been jilted? Or reluctance to assume a lower rank? Or perhaps
memory of her sister’s death on an earlier marriage voyage to
Bordeaux? Or was the whole aair a contrivance to acquire
revenues and a new wardrobe?
Bérard d’Albret was said to be so wounded by the bride’s
defection that he renounced his inheritance in favor of a younger
brother and put on the corded robe of a Franciscan friar. According
to other evidence, however, he married a Dame de St. Bazeille,
received certain territories from the King of France in 1370, and
adopted a shield with the strange device of a head of Midas
supported by two lions—which suggests interests the reverse of
Franciscan poverty.
Not at all put out by Isabella’s waywardness, her father continued
to endow her with efs and revenues, manors, castles, priories,
wardships, farms, and gifts of costly jewelry. Her expenditures
continued to outrace his gifts. When she bought silver buckles on
credit, let her servants’ wages fall into arrears, pawned her jewelry
up to the value of 1,000 marks, the King complacently paid her
debts, and in 1358, when she was 26, assigned her a regular income
of another £1,000 a year, which was duly paid as long as he lived.
Six years later he gave her the wardship of a rich minor, Edmund
Mortimer, Earl of March, which Isabella sold back to the Earl’s
mother for another £1,000 a year, with the sti proviso that if
quarterly payments were late by so much as a single day, the
penalty would be double payment for that quarter.
At what point during Enguerrand de Coucy’s ve-year sojourn in
England Isabella rst became interested in him is nowhere told, but
concerning her choice of him the chronicler Ranulph Higden stated
forthrightly that “only for love she wished to be betrothed.” It may
be that after all her years of single independence she really did fall
in love or, at her father’s suggestion, was willing enough, even
pleased, to marry a young attractive rich French lord of ancient
lineage and great estates. Edward was clearly pleased by the match

and may have been its instigator. Holding a great foothold in France
on the borders of Picardy, he would naturally wish to put the
hinterland of Calais in allied hands and nullify, in case of renewed
hostilities, a strong French opponent. He still thought in terms of
wooing the allegiance of great French nobles, the more so because
disputes continued to arise over the transfer of French territories.
Whether to win over Enguerrand, or because he had taken a
personal liking to him, Edward had already in 1363 restored him to
full possession of the lands in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmoreland,
and Cumberland inherited from his great-grandmother.
How Enguerrand felt about his marriage is a blank. Since his
sovereign and his prospective father-in-law were now at peace, no
conict of loyalty was involved. The comradeship of chivalry still
held nobles together in a trans-national bond that closed over as
soon as the temporary enmity of war was terminated. The material
advantages of the match, in freeing him from hostageship and
bringing money and power too, were obvious. How he felt about the
lady herself, who did not easily t the role of virginal demoiselle
merging into submissive wife, was another question.
Isabella’s life as an independent woman in a court of the usual
amorous license could hardly have been sheltered or innocent.
Ladies of the court were not reticent. Joan, widowed Countess of
Holland, called the Fair Maid of Kent, whom the Black Prince
married in 1361, was considered “the fairest lady in all the kingdom
of England” and “the most amorous.” She wore daring and
extravagant clothes copied from the dresses of the “bonnes amies of
the brigands of Languedoc.” At tournaments, to the scandal of the
people, there often came groups of questionable ladies, “the most
costly and lovely but not the best of the kingdom,” dressed “in
divers and wonderful male attire as if they were part of the
tournay.” Wearing divided and parti-colored tunics, short capes, and
daggers in pouches, riding ne coursers and palfreys, they exhibited
a “scurrilous wantonness” that “neither feared God nor blushed at
the scorn of the crowd.”
No female iniquity was more severely condemned than the habit
of plucking eyebrows and the hairline to heighten the forehead. For

some reason a particular immorality was attached to it, perhaps
because it altered God’s arrangements. Demons in purgatory were
said to punish the practice by sticking “hot burning awls and
needles” into every hole from which a hair had been plucked. When
a hermit was frightened by a dream about a lady suering this
treatment, an angel comforted him saying, “She had well deserved
the pain.”
As satirized by Jean de Meung through the mouth of the Duenna
in the Roman de la Rose, the concerns of a 13th to 14th century lady
were not peculiar to the Middle Ages. If her neck and bosom were
lovely, she should wear a decolletage; to add color to her face she
should use ointments daily, but in secret so that her lover does not
know; if aware of bad breath, she should not talk with her mouth
too close to others; she should laugh prettily and cry gracefully, eat
and drink daintily, and take care not to get drunk or sleep at table.
She should go to church, weddings, and parties in her best clothes to
let herself be seen and gain renown, lifting her gown to show her
ne foot and opening her mantle like a peacock’s tail to reveal the
beautiful form beneath. She should spread her nets for all men in
order to snare one, and if she hooks several, should take care they
do not meet. She should never love a poor man because she will get
nothing from him and might be tempted to give him something, nor
love a stranger, for he may have a vagabond heart, unless of course
he oers her money or jewels. While pretending to be won by love
alone, she should accept all gifts and encourage presents to her
servants, maid, sister, and mother, for many hands get more booty
and they can press her lover to get her gowns or other pledges out
of pawn.
The insistence on money may have been exaggerated by the
author, but satire is a wrapping of exaggeration around a core of
reality. Certainly in Isabella’s case money was of the essence. She
was said to have always in her retinue two or three goldsmiths,
seven or eight embroiderers, two or three cutlers, and two or three
furriers who were kept busy lling her needs.
If Isabella had any love aairs by the age of 33, they did not
reach recorded gossip, but, judging by example, they are not

unimaginable. The high-born maiden of seventeen who seduced the
elderly, gouty Guillaume de Machaut for the renown of having that
celebrated poet and musician as her lover was said to have been
Agnes of Navarre, sister of Charles the Bad. Whoever she was, she
insisted that Machaut publicize their aair in songs and poems and
in a long, lush, embarrassing verse narrative called Livre du Voir Dit
(True Tale). She teased and kissed and gave the bemused poet the
little gold key to the clavette or chastity belt that guarded her
“precious treasure.” All the time, as he discovered later, she was
regaling her young circle with accounts of the aair’s progress and
mocking her lover, as Boccaccio was mocked by his mistress
Fiammetta, bastard daughter of the King of Naples.
Medieval girls, like boys, became adults in their mid-teens.
Marriage was generally consummated at fourteen or thereafter,
although in the case of the highborn it might be legally concluded in
infancy or childhood. Another young girl, the fteen-year-old
heroine of Deschamps’s poem “Suis-je belle?”, clearly inspired by
Agnes of Navarre, also had control of the key to her “treasure,”
although this probably represented a literary echo of Agnes rather
than a common possession. Often spoken of as if it were familiar,
the chastity belt rests on only the faintest factual support in the
Middle Ages and was then probably more of a literary conceit than
an item of customary use. Believed to have evolved from the
Moslem practice of inbulation, which involved attaching a padlock
to the labia, it is said to have been imported to Europe with other
luxuries through the crusades. An occasional actual model exists,
but non-literary evidence such as lawsuits does not appear until the
Renaissance and later times. As a device of rabid male
possessiveness, the chastity belt aicted medieval women less than
their successors.
Deschamps’s luscious damsel details her charms in each stanza-
sweet red mouth, green eyes, dainty eyebrows, round chin, white
throat, rm high breasts, well-made thighs and legs, ne loins and
ne “cul de Paris”—following each with the refrain “Suis-je, suis-je,
suis-je belle?” (Am I, am I, am I not fair?). She is a male vision of the
amorous girl, but Agnes and the taunting Fiammetta were real

enough, though both are known, as are virtually all medieval
women, only through the pens of men. What is rare is a woman’s
account of herself. The anguished Héloïse in the 12th century and
the feminist Christine de Pisan in the later 14th speak out, and both
are bitter, although that does not necessarily establish a rule. In
individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to
unbalance the historical record.
Given the non-privacy of medieval life, little about sexual habits
was likely to be hidden from the unmarried girl, noble or otherwise.
That the Chevalier de La Tour Landry really designed his tales of
carnality for the moral edication of his motherless daughters need
not be taken at face value, but it is interesting that this was his
excuse. His book covers lechery, fornication, and rape, with
examples drawn from Lot’s daughters, the incest of Tamar, and cases
nearer home, such as the lady who loved a squire and contrived to
be with him by telling her husband she had vowed divers
pilgrimages so that he let her go where she list, or another lady who
was told by a knight that if she were wise and good she would not
“come to men’s chambers by nights darkly without candle nor to
coll and kiss men in her bed alone as she did.” Life in the castle was
evidently easy-going. Knights and ladies stayed up late, “singing,
playing and japing and making such noise they could not have
heard thunder,” and “when one of the men held his hand under one
of the women’s clothes,” he had his arm broken by the angry
husband.
Entertainment was not only the recital of lofty epics of chivalrous
if tedious adultery. The coarse comic fabliaux in quick rhymed
couplets, satiric, obscene, often cruel or grotesque, were told for
laughs like dirty stories of any age, to noble as well as bourgeois
audiences. Often written by court poets in parody of the romances,
they treated sex more as pratfall than ennoblement, and their recital
or reading aloud was as welcome in the castle as in town, tavern,
and probably cloister.
Isabella could well have listened to the tales of Jean de Condé,
poet in her lifetime at her mother’s native court in Hainault. His
style is illustrated by a story about a game of truth-telling played at

court before a tournament. A knight, asked by the Queen if he has
fathered any children, is forced to admit he has not, and indeed he
“did not have the look of a man who could please his mistress when
he held her naked in his arms. For his beard was … little more than
the kind of fuzz that ladies have in certain places.” The Queen tells
him she does not doubt his word, “for it is easy to judge from the
state of the hay whether the pitchfork is any good.” In his turn, the
knight asks, “Lady, answer me without deceit. Is there hair between
your legs?” When she replies, “None at all,” he comments, “Indeed I
do believe you, for grass does not grow on a well-beaten path.”
Life’s basic situation in the fabliaux is cuckoldry, with variations
in which an unpleasing lover is tricked or humiliated instead of the
husband. While husbands and lovers in the stories are of all kinds,
ranging from sympathetic to disgusting, women are invariably
deceivers: inconstant, unscrupulous, quarrelsome, querulous,
lecherous, shameless, although not necessarily all of these at once.
Despite their more realistic characters, the fabliaux were no more
true to life than the romances, but their antagonism to women
reected a common attitude which took its tone from the Church.
Woman was the Church’s rival, the temptress, the distraction, the
obstacle to holiness, the Devil’s decoy. In the Speculum of Vincent de
Beauvais, greatest of the 13th century encyclopedists and a favorite
of St. Louis, woman is “the confusion of man, an insatiable beast, a
continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a daily ruin, a house of
tempest,” and—nally the key—“a hindrance to devotion.” Vincent
was a Dominican of the severe order that bred the Inquisitors, which
may account for his pyramid of overstatement, but preachers in
general were not far behind. They denounced women on the one
hand for being the slaves of vanity and fashion, for monstrous
headdresses and the “lascivious and carnal provocation” of their
garments, and on the other hand for being over-industrious, too
occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to give
due thought to divine things.
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the
female. Had not a woman’s counsel brought rst woe by causing
Adam to lose Paradise? Of all mankind’s ideas, the equating of sex

with sin has left the greatest train of trouble. In Genesis, original sin
was disobedience to God through choosing knowledge of good and
evil, and as such the story of the Fall was an explanation of the toil
and sorrow of the human condition. In Christian theology, via St.
Paul, it conferred permanent guilt upon mankind from which Christ
oered redemption. Its sexual context was largely formulated by St.
Augustine, whose spiritual wrestlings set Christian dogma thereafter
in opposition to man’s most powerful instinct. Paradoxically, denial
became a source of attraction, giving the Church governance and
superiority while embedding its followers in perpetual dilemma.
“Allas, alias, that ever love was sinne!” cried the Wife of Bath.
What ages of anxiety and guilt are condensed into that succinct
lament, even if the speaker herself does not seem to have been
greatly incommoded by what she lamented. Indeed, through her,
the century’s most forthright celebration of sex was given to a
woman. More than in some later times, the sexuality of women was
acknowledged in the Middle Ages and the marital debt considered
mutual. Theologians bowed to St. Paul’s dictum, “Let the husband
render to his wife what is due her, and likewise the wife to the
husband,” but they insisted that the object must be procreation, not
pleasure.
To divide the amative from the procreative, as if by laying a
aming sword between the two, was another daring command
contrary to human habit. Christianity in its ideas was never the art
of the possible. It embraced Augustine’s principle that God and
Nature had put delight in copulation “to impel man to the act,” for
preservation of the species and the greater worship of God. Using
copulation for the delight that is in it and not for the end intended
by nature was, Augustine ruled, a sin against nature and therefore
against God, the ordainer of nature. Celibacy and virginity remained
preferred states because they allowed total love of God, “the spouse
of the soul.”
The struggle with carnality left many untouched; others were
tortured by it all their lives. It did not inhibit Aucassin from
preferring Hell to Paradise “if I may have with me Nicolette my
sweet love.” Nor did it inhibit creation of the Roman de la Rose, the

monumental bible of love written in two sections fty years apart
during the 13th century. Begun in the courtly tradition by one
author, it was expanded in a cynical and worldly version and at
inordinate length by another. When 21,780 lines of elaborate
allegory nally wind to an end, the Lover wins his Rose in an
explicit description of opening the bud, spreading the petals, spilling
“a little seed just in the center,” and “searching the calyx to its
inmost depths.”
Petrarch on the other hand, after twenty years of literary mooning
over Laura while fathering elsewhere two illegitimate children,
succeeded in his forties, “while my powers were unimpaired and my
passions still strong,” in throwing o the bad habits of an ardent
temperament which he “abhorred from the depths of my soul.”
Though still subject to “severe and frequent temptations,” he
learned to confess all his transgressions, pray seven times a day, and
“fear more than death itself that association with women which I
once thought I could not live without.” He had only to recollect, he
wrote to his brother the monk, “what woman really is,” in order to
dispel desire and retrieve his normal equanimity. “What woman
really is” referred to the clerical doctrine that beauty in women was
deceptive, masking falsehood and physical corruption.
“Wheresoever Beauty shows upon the face,” warned the preachers,
“there lurks much lth beneath the skin.”
The nastiness of women was generally perceived at the close of
life when a man began to worry about hell, and his sexual desire in
any case was fading. Deschamps as a poet began in good humor and
ended with a rancid tirade against women, the Miroir de Manage, in
which marriage appears as a painful servitude of suering, sorrow,
and jealousy—for the husband. Through 12,000 verses, he ground
out all the conventional clerical accusations of woman—as wanton,
quarrelsome, capricious, spendthrift, contradictory, over-talkative,
and so demanding that she exhausts her husband by her amorous
desires. Since Deschamps elsewhere describes himself as a
comfortably married man, this great pile of dead wood represented
his atonement, as the end approached, for having enjoyed women
and the pleasures of the esh.

Doctrine tied itself into innite knots over the realities of sex. If
the sacrament of marriage was holy, how could sexual pleasure
within marriage be sinful? If enjoyment was venial sin, at what
point did it become concupiscence, or immoderate desire, which
was mortal sin? Was bearing a child outside marriage, though
procreative, more sinful than intercourse only for pleasure within
marriage? Was a chaste or virgin marriage, though non-procreative,
more holy than marital intercourse? What if a man slept with his
wife when she was pregnant or after menopause when procreation
could not be the purpose? Or, being tempted by another woman,
slept with his wife to “cool o” illicit desire: that is, committed one
sin to avoid another? Or departed on crusade without his wife’s
consent or without taking her along, which was anti-procreative, yet
in the interests of the Church? These were questions that concerned
the dialecticians probably more than the average person.
Like usury, sex deed doctrinal certitude, except for the agreed-
upon principle that any sexual practice contrary to the arrangements
and ends “ordained by nature” was sinful. The covering term was
sodomy, which meant not only homosexuality but any use, with the
same or opposite sex, of the “unt” orice or the “unt” position, or
spilling the seed according to the sin of Onan, or auto-erotic
emission, or intercourse with beasts. All were sodomy, which, by
perverting nature, was rebellion against God and therefore counted
as the “worst of sins” in the category of lechery.
Marriage was the relationship of the sexes that absorbed major
interests. More than any other, it is the subject on the minds of the
Canterbury pilgrims and its dominant theme is who, as between
husband and wife, is boss? In real life too the question of obedience
dominates the manual of conduct composed by the Ménagier of
Paris for his fteen-year-old wife. She should obey her husband’s
commandments and act according to his pleasure rather than her
own, because “his pleasure should come before yours.” She should
not be arrogant or answer back or contradict him, especially in
public, for “it is the command of God that women should be subject
to men … and by good obedience a wise woman gains her
husband’s love and at the end hath what she would of him.” She

should subtly and cautiously counsel him against his follies, but
never nag, “for the heart of a man ndeth it hard to be corrected by
the domination and lordship of a woman.”
Examples of the terrible fate that meets carping and critical wives
are cited by the Ménagier and also by La Tour Landry, who tells
how a husband, harshly criticized by his wife in public, “being
angry with her governance, smote her with his st down to the
earth,” then kicked her in the face and broke her nose so that she
was disgured ever after and “might not for shame show her
visage.” And this was her due “for her evil and great language she
was wont to say to her husband.”
So much emphasis is repeatedly placed on compliance and
obedience as to suggest that opposite qualities were more common.
Anger in the Middle Ages was associated with women, and the sin of
Ire often depicted as a woman on a wild boar, although the rest of
the seven Vices were generally personied as men.* If the lay view
of medieval woman was a scold and a shrew, it may be because
scolding was her only recourse against subjection to man, a
condition codied, like everything else, by Thomas Aquinas. For the
good order of the human family, he argued, some have to be
governed by others “wiser than themselves”; therefore, woman, who
was more frail as regards “both vigor of soul and strength of body,”
was “by nature subject to man, in whom reason predominates.” The
father, he ruled, should be more loved than the mother and be owed
a greater obligation because his share in conception was “active,”
whereas the mother’s was merely “passive and material.” Out of his
oracular celibacy St. Thomas conceded that a mother’s care and
nourishment were necessary in the upbringing of the child, but
much more so the father’s “as guide and guardian under whom the
child progresses in goods both internal and external.” That women
reacted shrewishly in the age of Aquinas was hardly surprising.
Honoré Bonet posed the question whether a queen might judge a
knight when she was governing the kingdom in the king’s absence.
No, he answered, because “it is clear that man is much nobler than
woman, and of greater virtue,” so that a woman cannot judge a
man, the more so since “a subject cannot judge his lord.” How, in

these circumstances, the queen governed the kingdom is not
explained.
The apotheosis of subjection was patient Griselda, whose tale of
endurance under a husband’s cruel tests of her marital submission
so appealed to male authors that it was retold four times in the mid-
14th century, rst by Boccaccio, then in Latin by Petrarch, in
English by Chaucer in the Clerk’s Tale, and in French by the
Ménagier. Without complaint, Griselda suers each of her children
to be taken away to be killed, as her husband informs her, and then
her own repudiation and supposed divorce, before all is revealed as
a test, and she willingly reunites herself with the odious author of
her trials.
The Ménagier, a kindly man at heart, thought the story “telleth of
cruelty too great (to my mind) and above reason” and felt sure “it
never befel so.” Nevertheless, he thought his wife should be
acquainted with the tale so that she will “know how to talk about all
things like unto the others.” Medieval ladies depended on stories,
verbal games, and riddles for their amusement, and a well-bred
young married woman would need to be equipped to discuss the
abject Griselda and her appalling husband. In the end, Chaucer too
was ashamed of the story and in his envoy hastened to advise noble
wives,
Let noon humilitee your tonge naille …
Ne sureth nat that men yow doon oence …
Ne dreed hem nat, do hem no reverence …
Be ay of chere as light as leefe on linde,
And lat him care and wepe and wringe and waille!
Married love, despite the formula of courtly romance, was still a
desired goal to be achieved after, rather than before, the tying of the
knot. The task devolved upon the wife, whose duty was to earn her
husband’s love and “gain in this world that peace which may be in
marriage,” by constant attention, good care, amiability, docility,
acquiescence, patience, and no nagging. All the Ménagier’s wise
counsels on this matter can be rolled into one: “No man can be

better bewitched than by giving him what pleaseth him.” If the
Third Estate, which he represented, laid greater stress on married
love than did the nobility, it was doubtless because the more
continuous proximity of a bourgeois husband and wife made
amiable relations desirable. In England connubial contentment
could win the Dunmow Flitch—a side, or itch, of bacon awarded to
any couple who could come to Dunmow in Essex after a year of
marriage and truthfully swear that they never quarreled and did not
regret the marriage and would do it over again if given the chance.
While the cult of courtly love supposedly raised the standing of
noble ladies, the fervid adoration of the Virgin, which developed as
a cult at the same time, left little deposit on the status of women as
a whole. Women were criticized for gossip and chatter, for craving
sympathy, for being coquettish, sentimental, over-imaginative, and
over-responsive to wandering students and other beggars. They
were scolded for bustling in church, sprinkling themselves with holy
water at every turn, saying prayers aloud, kneeling at every shrine,
paying attention to anything but the sermon. Cloistered nuns were
said to be melancholy and irritable, “like dogs who are chained up
too much.” Nunneries were a refuge from the world for some, the
fate of others whose families oered them as gifts to the Church, the
choice of a few with a religious calling, but generally available only
to those who came with ample endowment.
Evidence from poll and hearth taxes indicates that women’s death
rate was higher than men’s between the ages of twenty and forty,
presumably from childbearing and greater vulnerability to disease.
After forty the death rate was reversed, and women, once widowed,
were allowed to choose for themselves whether to remarry or not.
In everyday life women of noble as well as non-noble class found
equality of function, if not of status, thrust on them by
circumstance. Peasant women could hold tenancies and in that
capacity rendered the same kinds of service for their holdings as
men, although they earned less for the same work. Peasant
households depended on their earnings. In the guilds, women had
monopolies of certain trades, usually spinning and ale-making and
some of the food and textile trades. Certain crafts excluded females

except for a member’s wife or daughter; in others they worked
equally with men. Management of a merchant’s household—of his
town house, his country estate, his business when he was absent—in
addition to maternal duties gave his wife anything but a leisured
life. She supervised sewing, weaving, brewing, candle-making,
marketing, alms-giving, directed the indoor and outdoor servants,
exercised some skills in medicine and surgery, kept accounts, and
might conduct a separate business as femme sole.
Some women practiced as professors or doctors even if
unlicensed. In Paris in 1322 a certain Jacoba Felicie was prosecuted
by the medical faculty of the University for practicing without their
degree or the Chancellor’s license. A witness testied that “he had
heard it said that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine
than the greatest master or doctor or surgeon in Paris.” At the
University of Bologna in the 1360s the faculty included Novella
d’Andrea, a woman so renowned for her beauty that she lectured
behind a veil lest her students be distracted. Nothing is said,
however, of her professional capacity.
The châtelaine of a castle more often than not had to manage
alone when her husband was occupied elsewhere, as he generally
was, for the sun never set on ghting in the 14th century. If not
ghting, or attending the King, he was generally being held
somewhere for ransom. In such case his wife had to take his place,
reach decisions and assume direction, and there were many besides
Jeanne de Montfort who did so. Marcia Ordela, left to defend
Cesena while her hot-tempered husband (he who had stabbed his
son) held a second city against the papal forces, refused all oers to
negotiate despite repeated assaults, mining of walls, bombardment
day and night by stones cast from siege engines, and the pleas of her
father to surrender. Suspecting her councillor of secretly arranging a
surrender, she had him arrested and beheaded. Only when her
knights told her that collapse of the citadel would allow no escape
from death and that they proposed to yield with or without her
consent did she agree to negotiate, on condition that she conduct
the parley herself. This she did so eectively that she obtained safe-
conduct for herself and her family and all servants, dependents, and

soldiers who had supported her. She was said to fear only the wrath
of her terrible husband—not without cause, for, despite all the talk
of courtoisie, lords of chivalry, no less than the bourgeois, were
known to beat their wives. In a case of particular brutality and high
rank, the Count of Armagnac was accused of breaking his wife’s
bones and keeping her locked up in an eort to extort property.
Woman’s status in the 14th century had one explicit female
exponent in Christine de Pisan, the only medieval woman, as far as
is known, to have earned a living by her pen. Born in 1364, she was
the daughter of Thomas of Pisano, a physician-astrologer with a
doctor’s degree from the University of Bologna who was summoned
to Paris in 1365 by the new King, Charles V, and remained in his
service. Christine was schooled by her father in Latin, philosophy,
and various branches of science not usual in a woman’s education.
At fteen, she married Etienne Castel of Picardy, one of the royal
secretaries. Ten years later, she was left alone with three children
when her husband, “in the ower of his youth,” and her father died
within a few years of each other. Without resources or relatives, she
turned to writing to earn the patronage that must henceforth be her
livelihood. She began with poetry, recalling in ballades and
rondeaux her happiness as a wife and mourning her sorrows as a
widow. Though the forms were conventional, the tone was personal.
No one knows the labor my poor heart endures
To dissimulate my grief when I nd no pity.
The less sympathy in friendship, the more cause for tears.
So I make no plaint of my piteous mourning,
But laugh when I would rather weep,
And without rhyme or rhythm make my songs
To conceal my heart.
The plaintive note (or perhaps more sympathy than Christine
pretended) loosened the purses of nobles and princes—whose status
was reected in patronage of the arts—and enabled Christine to

undertake studies for a ow of didactic prose works, many of them
adapted or translated from other authors, as was the common
practice of the time. No subject deterred her: she wrote a large
volume on the art of war based on the Roman classic De re militari
by Vegetius; a mythological romance; a treatise on the education of
women; and a life of Charles V which remains an important and
original work. Her own voice and interest are strongest when she
writes about her own sex, as in La Cité des dames on the lives of
famous women of history. Though translated from Boccaccio’s De
Claris mulieribus, Christine makes it her own in the prologue, where
she sits weeping and ashamed, wondering why men “are so
unanimous in attributing wickedness to women” and why “we
should be worse than men since we were also created by God.” In a
dazzling vision, three crowned female gures, Justice, Faith, and
Charity, appear to tell her that these views of the philosophers are
not articles of faith “but the mists of error and self-deception.” They
name the women of history who have excelled—Ceres, donor of
agriculture; Arachne, originator of spinning and weaving; and
various heroines of Homeric legend, the Old Testament, and
Christian martyrology.
In a passionate outcry at the close of the century in her Epistle to
the God of Love, Christine again asks why women, formerly so
esteemed and honored in France, are now attacked and insulted not
only by the ignorant and base but also by nobles and clergy. The
Epistle is a direct rejoinder to the malicious satire of women in Jean
de Meung’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose, the most popular
book of the age. A professional writer with a master’s degree in Arts
from the University of Paris, Jean de Meung was the Jonathan Swift
of his time, a satirist of the articial conventions in religion,
philosophy, and especially chivalry and its central theme of courtly
love. Nature and natural feeling are his heroes, False Seeming
(hypocrisy) and Forced Abstinence (obligatory chastity) his villains,
whom he personies as mendicant friars. Like the clerics who
blamed women for men’s desires, or like the policeman who arrests
the prostitute but not the customer, Jean de Meung, as a male,
blamed women for humanity’s departure from the ideal. Because

courtly love was a false glorication of women, he made women
personify its falsity and hypocrisy. Scheming, painted, mercenary,
wanton, Meung’s version of woman was simply the male fantasy of
courtly love in reverse. As Christine pointed out, it was men who
wrote the books.
Her protest was to provoke a vociferous debate between
antagonists and defenders of Jean de Meung in one of the great
intellectual controversies at the turn of the century. Meanwhile her
melancholy ute still sounded in poetry.
It is a month today
Since my lover went away.
My heart remains gloomy and silent;
It is a month today.
“Farewell,” he said, “I am leaving.”
Since then he speaks to me no more.
It is a month today.
As shown by the sumptuous bindings of surviving copies, her works
were in large demand by wealthy nobles. At the age of 54 she
retired to a convent in grief for the condition of France. She lived
for another eleven years to write a poem in praise of the gure who,
to posterity, stands out above all others of her time—another
woman, Joan of Arc.
Fixed as they were in the pattern of female nature conceived for
them by men, it was no accident that women often appeared among
the hysterical mystics. In the uncontrollable weeping of English
Margery Kempe there is a poignancy that speaks for many. She
began to weep while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem when “she had
such great compassion and such great pain at seeing the place of
Our Lord’s pain.” Thereafter her ts of “crying and roaring” and
falling on the ground continued for many years, once a month or a
week, sometimes daily or many times a day, sometimes in church or
in the street or in her chamber or in the elds. The sight of a
crucix might set her o, “or if she saw a man or beast with a
wound, or if a man beat a child before her, or smote a horse or

other beast with a whip, if she saw it or heard it, she thought she
saw our Lord being beaten or wounded.” She would try to “keep it
in as much as she could, that people might not hear it to their
annoyance, for some said that a wicked spirit vexed her or that she
had drunk too much wine. Some banned her, some wished her in
the sea in a bottomless boat.” Margery Kempe was obviously an
uncomfortable neighbor to have, like all those who cannot conceal
the painfulness of life.
On July 27, 1365, at Windsor Castle, Isabella of England and
Enguerrand de Coucy were married amid festivity and magnicence.
The nest minstrels in the realm played for the occasion. The bride
was resplendent in jewels received as her wedding present from her
father, mother, and brothers, at a cost of £2,370 13s. 4d. Her dowry,
considerably increased over the d’Albret marriage-portion, was an
annual pension of £4,000. The King’s gift to Enguerrand was no less
valuable: he was released from his role as hostage without payment
of ransom.
Four months later, in November, the couple received the King’s
leave to return to France, evidently given with some reluctance, for
the letter refers to a repeated request “to go into France to visit your
lands, possessions and estates.” Isabella being already pregnant, the
King’s letter promised that all children male or female born to her
abroad would be capable of inheriting lands in England and
considered “as fully naturalized as though they were born in the
realm.”
To the customary ringing of church bells vigorously pulled to
induce the saints to ease labor, a daughter was born at Coucy in
April 1366 and christened Marie. Before a month had passed,
Isabella with husband and infant was hurrying back to England. A
lady of rank and in delicate condition would travel in a four-
wheeled covered wagon with cushioned seats, accompanied by her
furniture, bed linen, vessels and plate, cooking pots, wine, and with
servants going on ahead to prepare lodgings and hang tapestries and
bed curtains. Even with such comforts, to brave the Channel

crossing and the bumpy land journey with a newborn baby seems
peculiar and reckless haste or a desperate aection for home.
Throughout her married life, Isabella never put down roots at
Coucy-le-Château, and instantly rushed back to her father’s court
whenever her husband departed on some expedition. Perhaps she
was unhappy in the great walled castle on the hill, or did not feel at
home in France, or more likely could not live without the
indulgence and royal surroundings of her youth.
Edward’s determination to attach Coucy as rmly as possible to
England was acted on as soon as Enguerrand and his wife returned.
On May 11, 1366, the Chancellor informed the nobles and commons
in Parliament, in the presence of Edward, “how the King had
married his daughter Isabella to the Lord de Coucy, who had
handsome estates in England and elsewhere; and for the cause that
he was so nearly allied to him, it were tting that the King should
enhance and increase him in honor and name, and make him an
earl; and thereupon he requested that advice and assent.” Lords and
Commons duly consented, leaving to the King the choice of what
lands and title to confer. Enguerrand was named to the vacant
earldom of Bedford with a revenue of 300 marks a year, and as
Ingelram,* Earl of Bedford, he appears thereafter in English records.
To complete the honors, he was inducted into the Order of the
Garter.
At the same time Isabella received yet another £200 of annual
revenues, which promptly disappeared down the bottomless drain of
her expenditures. She seems to have been one of those people for
whom spending is a neurosis, for within a few months of her return,
the King paid £130 15s. 4d. to discharge her debts to merchants for
silk and velvet, taetas, gold cloth, ribands and linen, and another
£60 to redeem a jeweled circlet she had pawned.
Sometime before Easter of 1367, which fell on April 18, the
Coucys’ second daughter was born in England, within a year of the
rst. Named Philippa for her grandmother the Queen, the infant
received from her royal grandparents an elaborate silver service of
six bowls, gilded and chased, six cups, four water pitchers, four

platters, and 24 each of dishes, salt cellars, and spoons costing a
total of £239 18s. 3d.
In further enlargement of his fortune, Enguerrand now acquired
the equivalent of an earldom in France, helped thereto by the not
disinterested hand of his father-in-law. A fellow hostage, and
neighbor in France, was Guy de Blois et de Châtillon, Count of
Soissons, a nephew of both Philip VI and Charles de Blois of
Brittany, who despite his great family and connections, had so far
been unable to buy his liberty. As the price of his release, an
arrangement was now reached by which, with the consent of King
Charles of France, he ceded his county of Soissons to Edward, who
in turn presented it to Coucy in lieu of the £4,000 provided by
Isabella’s dowry. The great domains of Coucy and Soissons,
constituting a sizable portion of Picardy, were now joined in the
hands of a son-in-law of the King of England. With a territorial title
diluting the once proud austerity of the Coucy motto, Enguerrand
was now Count of Soissons, and as such returned with his wife and
daughters to France in July 1367.

If the unit was the Flemish ell of 27 inches, the coverlet would have measured
17 by 18 feet; if it was the English ell of 45 inches, the dimensions would
have been 28 by 30 feet.

In one 14th century illuminated manuscript, Pride was a knight on a lion,
Envy a monk on a dog, Sloth a peasant on a donkey, Avarice a merchant on a
badger, Gluttony a youth on a wolf, Ire a woman on a boar, and Luxury
(instead of the standard Lechery) a woman on a goat.

Judging by the diverse spelling of proper names on either side of the Channel,
pronunciation of the common language must have been close to mutually
unintelligible. Chaucer’s Prioresse spoke French
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,
For Frensh of Paris was to hir unknowe.

Chapter 10

I
Sons of Iniquity
n the seven years of Coucy’s absence in England, the havoc
wrought by the Free Companies, spreading through France,
Savoy, Lombardy, and the papal dominions, had become a
major fact of European aairs. Not a passing phenomenon nor
an external force, the companies had become a way of life, a part of
society itself, used and joined by its rulers even as they struggled to
throw them o. They ate at society from within like Erysichthon,
the “tearer up of earth,” who, having destroyed the trees in the
sacred grove of Demeter, was cursed by the goddess with an
insatiable appetite and nally devoured himself attempting to
satisfy his hunger.
Discipline and organization made the companies more useful as
ghting forces than knights bent on glory and unacquainted with
the principle of command. Rulers employed them, as when Amadeus
VI, Count of Savoy, contracted with one of the worst of the captains
to crush the partisans of an opponent by use of terrorism within his
own dominions. Whether employed or living by adventure, they
made pillage pay the cost. Life by the sword became subordinate to
its means; the means became the end; the climate of the 14th
century succumbed to the brute triumph of the lawless.
In France during the transfer of territories, despite the renewed
orders of King Edward, many bands refused to demobilize or
evacuate their fortresses. Discharged from regular employment, like
bees from a broken hive, they created small hives around a
particular captain and joined the host of Tard-Venus. Finding
mercenary employment combined with brigandage protable, they
spread, attracting into their ranks those who quickly relapse into
lawlessness when the social contract breaks down. While the lower
ranks came from the debris of town and country and from the cast-

os of every occupation including the Church, the leaders came
from the top—lords who found a life of gain by the sword
irresistible, or losers of the knightly class whom the companies
themselves had uprooted. Unable to live adequately o ruined
lands, they joined the mercenaries rather than follow a life without
the sword. “Unbridled in every kind of cruelty,” in the words of the
Pope’s excommunication in 1364, they seemed to defenseless people
like another plague, to be attributed to the planets or God’s wrath.
In France they were called écorcheurs (skinners) and routiers
(highwaymen), in Italy condottieri from the condotta or contract that
xed the terms of their employment as mercenaries. They extorted a
systematized income from vulnerable towns in the form of appatis, a
forced tribute to buy freedom from attack, of which the terms were
put in writing by clerks. They drew into their service from ordinary
life notaries, lawyers, and bankers to handle their aairs, as well as
clerks, blacksmiths, tanners, coopers, butchers, surgeons, priests,
tailors, laundresses, prostitutes, and often their own legal wives.
They dealt through regular brokers who sold their plunder, except
for particular arms or luxuries they wished to keep, such as jewels
and women’s gowns or steel for swords or, in one case, ostrich
plumes and beaver hats. They became installed in the social
structure. When Burgundy was occupied by the “Archpriest” Arnaut
de Cervole in 1364, young Duke Philip treated him with respect,
calling him his adviser and companion, and making over to him a
castle and several noble hostages as security until he could raise
2,500 gold francs to buy his departure. To raise the sum, Philip
adopted the usual expedient of taxing his subjects, another cause of
bitterness against the lords.
Bertucat d’Albret, of the same family as Isabella’s rejected
bridegroom, was one of the notable great lords who were more
pillard than seigneur. Years later, in old age, he sighed for the days
“when we would leap upon rich merchants from Toulouse or La
Riolle or Bergerac. Never did a day fail to bring us some ne prize
for our enrichment and good cheer.” His friend and fellow Gascon,
Seguin de Badefol, often called “King of the Companies,” replaced
the ve hats in his father’s coat-of-arms with ve bezants, or gold

coins, indicating his major interest. Aimerigot Marcel, who after
thirty years as a brigand was to end on the scaold, boasted of his
takings in silks from Brussels, skins from the fairs, spices coming
from Bruges, rich fabrics from Damascus and Alexandria. “All was
ours or ransomed at our will.… The peasants of Auvergne supplied
us in our castle, bringing wheat and our and fresh bread, hay for
the horses, good wine, beef and mutton, fat lambs and poultry. We
were provisioned like kings. And when we rode forth the country
trembled before us.”
Popular hatred credited the companies with every crime from
eating meat in Lent to committing atrocities upon pregnant women
which caused death to unborn and unbaptized children. Three
quarters of France was their prey, especially the wine-growing areas
of Burgundy, Normandy, Champagne, and Languedoc. Walled towns
could organize resistance, turning back the violence upon the
countryside, which was repeatedly devastated, creating a vagabond
population of destitute peasants, artisans seeking work, priests
without parishes.
The companies did not spare churches. “Insensible to the fear of
God,” wrote Innocent VI in a pastoral letter of 1360, “the sons of
iniquity … invade and wreck churches, steal their books, chalices,
crosses, relics and vessels of the divine ritual and make them their
booty.” Churches where blood had been spilled in combat were
considered profaned and prohibited from sacramental use until they
had gone through a long bureaucratic process of reconciliation.
Nevertheless, papal taxes continued, and incumbents of ruined
beneces were often reduced to penury, and deserted, not
infrequently to join their persecutors. “See how grave it has
become,” mourned Innocent in the same letter, “when those charged
with divine grace … participate in rapine and despoliation, even in
the shedding of blood.”
With clergy and knights joining the sons of iniquity, the average
man felt himself living in an age of rapine and powerless to control
it. “If God Himself were a soldier, He would be a robber,” said an
English knight named Talbot.

One chain still held: the necessity of absolution. Fear of dying
without it was so ingrained that ghosts were believed to be the souls
of the unshriven who had returned to seek absolution for their sins
in life. No matter how far the brigands had separated themselves
from other rules, they insisted on the formula if not the substance of
forgiveness. In theory a man who met death in a “just war” would
go straight to Heaven if he had repented of his sins, but a knight
guilty of the sin of rapine would have to prove penitence by
restitution of his gains. Making no pretense of just war, much less
given to restitution, the companies were content to extort absolution
by force, like a bag of gold. When negotiating ransoms or quittances
with their captives, even those they had maimed or tortured, they
would make it a condition of release that the victims solicit
absolution for them or urge the Pope to lift his excommunication.
Innocent’s successor, Urban V, issued two Bulls of
Excommunication in 1364, Cogit Nos and Miserabilis Nonullorum,
which were supposed to have the eect of prohibiting any
cooperation with or provisioning of the companies, and which
oered plenary indulgence to all who died in combatting them. If
the ban disturbed the brigands, it did not restrain them.
The outstanding professional among the Tard-Venus, one whom
Coucy was destined to meet in combat, was Sir John Hawkwood,
who rst appeared by name as leader of one of the companies
besieging Avignon in 1361. His origin was the kind that sent many
into the companies. As the second son of a minor landowner and
tanner by trade, he left home when his elder brother inherited the
manor along with £10, six horses, and a cart, leaving the younger
son landless with a portion of £20 10s. Listed among the English
army in France in the 1350s, Hawkwood was “still a poor knight
who had gained nothing but his spurs” when he joined the Tard-
Venus after Brétigny. He was then about 35. By the time he was
diverted by papal gold from Avignon to Italy, he commanded the
White Company of 3,500 mounted men and 2,000 foot whose white
ags and tunics and highly polished breastplates gave the company
its name. On their rst appearance in Lombardy they spread terror
by their fury and license, and as time went on, “nothing was more

terrible to hear than the name of the English.” They gained the
reputation of perdi e scelleratissimi (perdious and most wicked),
although it was conceded that “they did not roast and mutilate their
victims like the Hungarians.”
Hired by one or another of the Italian city-states in their chronic
wars, Hawkwood could soon command the highest price for his
services. However ruthless his methods—and they inspired the
proverb “an Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate”—he spent
no time on mere brigandage, but contracted his company to
whatever power had the capacity to pay, on either side in any war.
He fought for Pisa against Florence and vice versa, for the papal
forces against the Visconti and vice versa, and on leaving the service
of the Visconti, correctly turned back to Galeazzo the castles the
White Company had conquered. War was business to Hawkwood,
provided that his contracts exempted him from ghting against the
King of England. When he died after 35 years in Italy, rich in lands,
pensions, and renown, he was buried in the cathedral of Florence
and commemorated by Uccello’s equestrian fresco over the door.
National pride in the year of his death reclaimed him; at the
personal request of Richard II, his body was returned to England for
burial in his native town.
In Italy the companies were used virtually as ocial armies in
public wars. In France they were out of control. The only eective
counter-force would have been a permanent army, which was not
yet within the vision of the state nor within its nancial capacity.
The only feasible strategy against the companies was to pay them to
go somewhere else. Since the King of Hungary was appealing for
help against the Turks, a concerted eort to drain o the menace in
a crusade was made in 1365 by the Pope, the Emperor, and the King
of France.
The person nominated by the former Regent, now Charles V, to
lead the crusade was a strange new captain as rough as his Breton
name, which the French rendered De Clequin or Kaisquin or Clesquy
until fame settled on Bertrand Du Guesclin. Flat-nosed, dark-
skinned, short, and heavy, “there was none so ugly from Rennes to
Dinant.” So begins Cuvelier’s rhymed epic designed to create a

French hero to rival Chandos Herald’s panegyric of the Black Prince.
“Wherefore his parents hated him so sore that often in their hearts
they wished him dead. Rascal, Fool, or Clown they were wont to
call him; so despised was he as an ill-conditioned child that squires
and servants made light of him.” The parents were poor nobility.
The uncouth son, unspoiled by tournaments, learned to ght in the
guerrilla warfare of Brittany in the service of Charles of Blois,
becoming skilled in the tactics of ambush and ruse, the use of
disguise, spies, secret messengers, smoke clouds to hide movements,
bribes of money and wine, torture and killing of prisoners, and
surprise attacks launched during the “Truce of God.” He was
intrepid as he was unscrupulous, erce with the sword but ever
ready to use stratagem; hard, tricky, and ruthless as any écorcheur.
Born between 1315 and 1320, he did not become a knight until
he was over 35 and had won local renown in the defense of Rennes.
His bold capture of a fortress from the Navarrese, witnessed by the
Regent, began his prominence in the royal service. Though Charles
V was not a ghter himself, he had a ghting purpose. Through all
the years since the Treaty of Brétigny, his single silent overriding
aim was to frustrate the renunciations of territory that would have
dismembered the realm. Having no wish to lead a host in battle, he
knew he needed a military leader, and found one in this “hog in
armor,” the rst eective commander comparable to the Black
Prince or Sir John Chandos to appear on the French side.
In 1364, the opening year of Charles’s reign, Du Guesclin led the
French to victory, then defeat, in two historic battles. In the rst at
Cocherel in Normandy against the forces of Charles of Navarre, the
numbers were small but the outcome was large, for it led to the
elimination of Navarre’s chronic threat to Paris. The battle was even
more notable for the capture of Navarre’s cousin, the Captal de
Buch, whom Charles afterward liberated without asking ransom in
the hope of winning over this heart of turbulence to the French side.
The second battle ve months later, at Auray on the rocky Breton
coast, was decisive for the war in Brittany. Charles of Blois, the
French candidate for the dukedom, was killed and Du Guesclin
taken prisoner. This was the last clash of the rival Dukes of Brittany,

leaving the English candidate, Jean de Montfort, in possession,
although by the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny the dukedom
remained a French ef. The defeat was in fact turned by Charles V
into a source of advantage. By means of a huge pension, he
persuaded Blois’s widow to yield her claim, thus ending the running
war and the bleeding of French strength. Charles V was one who
preferred not to ght where he could buy.
Du Guesclin, after being ransomed, did not fall from favor. His
rise had been predicted by astrology and the prophecies of Merlin,
which may have appealed to Charles, who, for all his astuteness,
was a devotee of astrology, as was Du Guesclin. Besides keeping an
astrologer at hand on all his campaigns, Bertrand was also married
to one, a lady trained in the subject and famed for her occult
powers. The King’s interest was more scientic. Like most rulers, he
employed a court astrologer who advised on propitious times for
action and carried out condential missions; but going beyond that,
Charles commissioned translations of astrological works and
founded a college of astrology at the University of Paris which he
equipped with library, instruments, and royal scholarships.
In 1365 he summoned to his court Thomas of Pisano, a doctor of
astrology from the University of Bologna whose imaginative if
somewhat risky talents must have suited the King because he kept
him on at a salary of 100 francs a month. It is not impossible that
Charles’s perpetual illnesses may have owed something to a
medicine containing mercury prepared for him by Thomas, for
which the doctor was much blamed. Undeterred, Thomas went on to
an experiment “unique and ineable,” of which the object was to
expel the English from France. Out of lead and tin, he fashioned
hollow images of nude men, lled them with earth collected from
the center and four corners of France, inscribed the foreheads with
the names of King Edward or one of his captains, and, when the
constellations were right, buried them face down while he recited
spells to the eect that this was perpetual expulsion, annihilation,
and burial of the said King, captains, and all adherents.
When it came to removing the companies, a more practical
method was through crusade in Hungary. The Emperor Charles IV,

anxious to repel the Turks, came himself to Avignon with an oer to
underwrite the costs of the journey and guarantee the revenues of
Bohemia for three years to pay the mercenaries. His appearance at
mass with Urban V on Whitsunday, Emperor and Pope sitting side
by side, at peace for the rst time in living memory, cast a spell of
hope over the occasion. Urban announced that the tithes of the
French clergy would be turned over to the King of France to enable
him to nance his share of the enterprise. Despite all the promised
money, and Paradise too—for excommunication would be lifted by
crusade—the mercenaries viewed the prospect of Hungary with the
greatest distaste, asking “why should they go so far to make war?”
But pressed by the strength of sentiment for their departure and
given Arnaut de Cervole, one of their own, as leader replacing Du
Guesclin, some were persuaded. From various places, various bodies
set forth in the summer of 1365 for a rendezvous in Lorraine within
the Empire.
The rest was asco. The brigands’ terrible repute roused the
population of Alsace to desperate resistance. Despite Arnaut’s
assurances that he had no designs on the country and wanted only
to water his horses in the Rhine, the citizens of Strasbourg refused
to let them cross the bridge, and the Emperor was forced by his
subjects to appear with an army to bar the way. The companies’
own reluctance more than the people’s resistance turned them back
within a month. In the meantime a new enterprise had need of them
in Spain.
The Anglo-French war had not really been ended in Brétigny; it
had moved down to Spain to take sides in a struggle for the crown
between Pedro the Cruel, King of Castile, whose oppressions had
aroused a revolt, and his illegitimate brother Don Enrique of
Trastamare, eldest of his father’s ten bastards and leader of the
opposition. The issue aected the balance of forces swirling around
Languedoc, Aquitaine, and Navarre. Since Pedro was supported by
the English and had furthermore abandoned and reputedly
murdered his wife, who was a sister of the Queen of France, and
since Don Enrique was the protégé of the French, whose accession
would place an ally on an important throne, the struggle sucked in

the former antagonists. Furthermore, Don Pedro was an enemy of
the Pope, who had excommunicated him for refusing to obey a
summons to Avignon to answer charges of wicked conduct.
The Spanish cockpit oered, under the guise of a crusade against
the Moors of Granada, an ideal outlet and perhaps a grave for the
companies. Du Guesclin as the appointed leader had persuaded
twenty-ve captains of the most dangerous companies, including
Hugh of Calveley and Eustache d’Aubrecicourt and others who had
been his opponents at Auray, to follow him to Spain. High pay was
promised, but the men of the companies had no intention of
crossing the Pyrenees without a grip on hard cash. The
confrontation by which it was obtained, told with relish in
Cuvelier’s epic, is a microcosm of the 14th century, even though it
has been said of Cuvelier that “the tyranny of rhyme left him little
leisure for accuracy.”
Marching to Avignon instead of directly to Spain, the companies
camped within sight of the papal palace across the Rhône at
Villeneuve. There the Pope sent a trembling cardinal to tell them
“that I who have the power of God and all the saints, angels and
archangels, will excommunicate the whole company if they do not
go from hence without delay.” Met courteously by Du Guesclin and
the “learned, wise and prudent knight” Marshal d’Audrehem,
veteran of Poitiers, the cardinal was asked if he had brought any
money; he tactfully replied that he had been sent to learn their
purpose in coming to Avignon.
“Sir,” responded d’Audrehem, “you see before you men who for
ten years have committed many evil deeds in the realm of France,
who are now on their way to ght the miscreants in Granada,” and
whose leaders were conducting them there “so that they should not
return again to France.” Before leaving, each was a suppliant for
absolution, therefore the Holy Father was begged “to release us
from all our sins and from punishment of the grievous and weighty
crimes which all of us have committed since infancy, and besides,
that for our voyage he would present us with 200,000 francs.”
“Changing his face,” the cardinal replied that, though their
numbers were great, he thought he could assure them of absolution,

but not the money. “Sir,” quickly intervened Bertrand, “we must
have all that the Marshal has asked, for I tell you that there are
many here who care little for absolution; they would rather have the
money.” Adding that “we are leading them to where they can
rightfully pillage without doing harm to Christian people,” he urged
that unless their demands were met, the men could not be managed,
and the longer they waited, the sorrier it would be for Villeneuve.
Hastening back over the bridge, the cardinal told the Pope rst
about the companies’ request for absolution, saying that he had
brought their confession of crimes. “They have … committed all the
evil that one could do and more than one could tell; so they beg for
mercy and pardon of God and full absolution from you.”
“They shall have it,” said the Pope without hesitation, “provided
that they then leave the country.” Then the additional matter of
200,000 francs was laid before him. From his window Urban could
see the men-at-arms seizing livestock, chickens and geese, good
white bread, and everything they could carry away. Summoning a
council for advice on how to raise the money, he adopted the
suggestion that it be raised from a tax on the bourgeois of Avignon,
“so that the treasures of God might not be diminished.” When the
money thus collected was brought to Du Guesclin by the Provost of
Avignon along with the absolutions signed and sealed, Du Guesclin
asked if it had come from the papal treasury. On being told that it
had been contributed by the commons of Avignon, he denounced
the avarice of Holy Church “very irreverently” and swore he would
not accept a penny unless it came from the clergy; all the taxed
money must be restored to the people who had paid it. “Sir,” said
the Provost, “God grant you a happy life; the poor people will be
greatly rejoiced.” The money was duly returned to the people and
replaced by 200,000 francs from the papal treasury, for which the
Pope quickly indemnied himself by imposing a tithe on the clergy
of France.
On the English side, image-making was at work too, notably by
Chandos Herald, who celebrated the Black Prince’s rule of Aquitaine
at this time as “seven years of joy, peace and pleasantness,” when in
fact it was the reverse. The Prince’s arrogance and extravagance

were arousing in his Gascon subjects a fury of resentment and a
turning toward France. Imbued with ideals of largesse and the
nobility of bankruptcy, the Prince was indierent to any balance
between income and expenditure. He made up the gap by taxes
which alienated the loyalty and allegiance he was supposed as
viceroy to promote. “Since the time that God was born, never was
open house kept so handsomely and honorably.” He fed “more than
fourscore knights and full four times as many squires”—some 400
people—at his table every day, maintained a huge retinue of
squires, pages, valets, stewards, clerks, hawkers, and huntsmen; held
banquets, hunting parties, and tournaments, and would himself be
served by none but a knight wearing golden spurs. His wife, the
beauteous Joan, outdid her sister-in-law Isabella in sumptuous
fabrics, furs, jewels, gold, and enamel. The Prince’s reign, Chandos
Herald enthusiastically reported, was marked by “liberality, high
purpose, good sense, moderation, righteousness, reason, justice and
restraint.” Except for the rst two, the Prince had none of these
qualities.
Du Guesclin’s warriors went o to Spain, where they fought with
such eect and dispatch that Don Pedro ed, Don Enrique was
crowned King, and the companies, of whom too few found a grave,
returned all too soon to France. The interests of England, however,
renewed the struggle. Don Pedro appealed to the Black Prince, who,
moved by eagerness for war and glory, took up his cause. He was
moved, too, by the need to break a Franco-Castilian alliance which,
owing to a strong Spanish eet, threatened English communication
with Aquitaine and heightened the persistent English fear of
invasion. Finances, as always, were crucial. Don Pedro swore to
repay all costs when he had regained the throne, and the Black
Prince, though advised not to rely on a man so stained by villainies,
refused to forgo the battle. With Du Guesclin and the French
companies again supporting Don Enrique, the war was reopened in
1367 and the outcome reversed.
At the Battle of Najera in April 1367 the English won a victory
famous in medieval annals, and the French suered another of the
defeats that were undercutting not only the renown but the fact of

military supremacy. Don Enrique had been advised by Du Guesclin
and Marshal d’Audrehem not to risk a pitched battle against the
Prince and “the best ghting men on earth,” but rather to cut o
their supplies and “to famish them without striking a blow”—the
same advice given and ignored by the French at Poitiers. For various
reasons of terrain, weather, and because it would have seemed
ignoble to the new King’s Spanish following, the advice was
impractical and the result catastrophic. Don Enrique ed, Don Pedro
was restored, and Bertrand Du Guesclin a second time taken
prisoner. Although inclined to hold him, the Prince let himself be
stung by Bertrand’s taunt that he was keeping him “out of fear,” and
agreed to let him be ransomed at a sti price of 100,000 francs.
If glory was lost at Najera, the defeat, like that of Auray, was not
without advantage, for only battered remnants of the companies
returned to France. For this relief Du Guesclin received the credit, so
that, as Deschamps was to write, all the prayers of the common
people were lavished upon him. Further relief resulted from the
deaths of the bandit leader Seguin de Badefol and the
“Archpriest”—the former poisoned at dinner by Charles of Navarre
to avoid paying him, and the latter assassinated by his own
followers. The respite, however, was short. When Don Pedro, as
predicted, defaulted on his debts, the Black Prince, hard-pressed by
angry unpaid troops, “encouraged them underhand” to lter back
into France to supply themselves there by the usual forceful means.
Small in numbers but war-hardened and formidable, Anglo-Gascon
bands made their way into Champagne and Picardy, “where they
did so much damage and wicked acts as caused great tribulation.”
For the Prince, the glory of Najera quickly turned sour; the victory
for him was the peak of Fortune’s Wheel—all the rest was to be
downward. His pride alienated the Gascons, for “he did not value a
knight at one button, nor a burgher nor a burgher’s wife, nor any
common folk.” When he transferred the burden of Don Pedro’s debts
to the people of Guienne in the form of annual hearth taxes in
1367–68, Gascon lords rebelled and re-opened negotiations with
Charles V for a return to French allegiance. A cause and an

instrument for upsetting the Treaty of Brétigny was now in the
French King’s hands.

Chapter 11

S
The Gilded Shroud
uch was the France to which Coucy returned in 1367. His own
domain, judging by a major step he took in the following year,
suered from the shortage of labor that was aicting
landowners everywhere since the Black Death. Picardy, in the
path of English penetration from the start, had suered not only
from invaders but also from the Jacquerie and the ravaging of the
Anglo-Navarrese. Rather than pay the repeated taxes that followed
upon French defeats, peasants deserted to nearby imperial territory
in Hainault and across the Meuse.
To hold labor on the land, Coucy’s rather belated remedy was
enfranchisement of the serfs, or non-free peasants and villagers, of
his domain. From “hatred of servitude,” his charter acknowledged,
they had been leaving, “to live outside our lands, in certain places,
freeing themselves without our permission and making themselves
free whenever it pleased them.” (A serf who reached territory
outside his lord’s writ and stayed for a year was regarded as free.)
Except for the charter issued to Coucy-le-Château in 1197, Coucy’s
territory was late in the dissolution of serfdom, perhaps owing to
former prosperity. Free peasants were already in the majority in
France before the Black Death. Abolition had occurred less from any
moral judgment of the evils of servitude than as a means of raising
ready money from rents. Though the paid labor of free tenants was
more expensive than the unpaid labor of serfs, the cost was more
than made up by the rents, and, besides, tenants did not have to be
fed on the job, which had amounted to an important expense.
Coucy’s charter of August 1368 took the form of a collective grant
of freedom to 22 towns and villages of his barony in return for
specic rents and revenues from each, “in perpetuity to us and our
successors.” The sums ranged from 18 livres for Trosly down to 24

sous for Fresnes (still extant villages, as are most in the list), and 18
pence per hearth for Courson. The wording, though swollen by
lawyers’ superuity in every line, is a clear and precise picture of
medieval tenure, unlike the dense tangle that has been made of the
subject ever since.
“By general custom and usage,” it states, all persons who live in
the barony of Coucy “are our men and women by morte-main and
formariage” except if they are clerics or nobles or others “who hold
of us by oath and homage.” Because of the many who have
departed, “our said land was left in great part uncultivated,
unworked and reverted to wasteland, for which the said land is
greatly reduced in value.” In the past the inhabitants had requested
their freedom from his father, oering certain revenues in
perpetuity, “of which thing our dear and well-beloved father whose
soul is with God took counsel and found it would greatly prot him
to destroy and render null the said custom, taking the prot oered
to him”; but before he could accomplish the request, he died. Being
fully informed of these things, and having come of age and in full
control of his lands, and since the same request has been made of
him and payments oered “more protable and honorable than the
said morte-mains and formariages are or could be in the future”; and
since by ending their servitude “the people will be more abundant
and the land cultivated and not allowed to revert to waste, and in
consequence more valuable to us and to our successors”; therefore,
let it be known that, having taken “great deliberation on these said
matters and well ascertained our rights and prots, we do destroy
and render null … and free of all morte-mains and formariages each
of them in perpetuity and for always, whether clergy or any other
estate, without retaining servitude or power to renew servitude to
any of them now or in the future by us or our successors nor by any
other persons whatsoever.” Rent and revenues to be received from
the said places will be joined “to our heritage and ef and barony
which we hold of the King,” who will be asked to approve and
conrm the deed. Royal conrmation was duly received three
months later.

Landowners in general, especially the less prosperous with
holdings too small to allow a margin of revenue, had suered
economically more than the peasantry from the disasters of the past
twenty years. Servile labor, lost through the plague, could not be
replaced, since free men could not be turned back into serfs. Mills,
granaries, breweries, barns, and other permanent equipment had to
be rebuilt at the cost of the owner. Expenses of ransom and upkeep
as a prisoner during two decades of largely lost battles, even if the
cost was passed on to towns and peasants, were a drain on revenues,
although Coucy, whom fortune always favored, did not suer from
this particular blight. Besides having been spared ransom, he
received 1,000 francs from the King of France in June 1368 to
reimburse him for his expenses as hostage and repair damages
caused by the war to his domain. Charles V, too, was wooing the
lord of Coucy and Soissons.
If ties between lord and dependent were weakened by the transfer
to a paid basis, the revenue from rents gave the wealthier nobles
greater goods and comforts and freedom of residence. They were
building great hotels in Paris and acquiring urban interests. The
center of attraction was now the King’s new residence called St. Pol,
a collection of houses which he had assembled and converted into a
palace with seven gardens and a cherry orchard on the eastern edge
of the city near the present Place de la Bastille. Twelve galleries
connected its buildings and courtyards; topiary gures adorned the
gardens, lions were kept in the menageries and nightingales and
turtledoves in the aviary.
Charles reigned in a time of havoc, but in all such times there are
unaected places lled with beauty and games, music and dancing,
love and work. While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of
ames by night mark burning towns, the sky over the neighboring
vicinity is clear; where the screams of tortured prisoners are heard
in one place, bankers count their coins and peasants plow behind
placid oxen somewhere else. Havoc in a given period does not cover
all the people all the time, and though its eect is cumulative, the
decline it drags behind takes time before it is recognized.

At Coucy’s level, men and women hawked and hunted and carried
a favorite falcon, hooded, on the wrist wherever they went, indoors
or out—to church, to the assizes, to meals. On occasion, huge
pastries were served from which live birds were released to be
caught by hawks unleashed in the banquet hall. At the turret of the
castle where the lord’s ag ew, a watchman was stationed with a
horn to blow at the approach of strangers. He blew also for the hour
of rising at sunup or cockcrow, after which matins were chanted by
the chaplain, followed by mass in the chapel. In the evening
minstrels played with lutes and harps, reed pipes, bagpipes,
trumpets, kettle drums, and cymbals. In the blossoming of secular
music as an art in the 14th century, as many as 36 dierent
instruments had come into use. If no concert or performance was
scheduled after the evening meal, the company entertained each
other with song and conversation, tales of the day’s hunting,
“graceful questions” on the conventions of love, and verbal games.
In one game the players wrote verses, more or less impolite, on little
rolls of parchment, which were passed around and, when read
aloud, supposedly revealed the character of the reader.
At such evenings grand seigneurs liked to preserve the old custom
of lighting rooms by means of torches held by servants, instead of
wall sconces, because it satised a sense of grandeur. They built
their “follies,” of which the most elaborate were the mechanical
practical jokes devised by Count Robert of Artois at the château of
Hesdin. Statues in his garden squirted water on visitors when they
walked past or squawked words at them like parrots; a trapdoor
dropped the passerby onto a featherbed below; a room, on the
opening of the door, produced rain or snow or thunder; conduits
under certain pressures “wet the ladies from below.” When the
château passed into the possession of Philip of Burgundy, the
devices were kept in working order by a resident artist.
In Picardy, for more general enjoyment, the swan festival was
held in July and August, when all three estates joined to chase the
young swans raised in local ponds and canals and not yet able to y.
Led by the clergy, followed by nobles, bourgeois, and commoners in
order, everyone went out in boats accompanied by music and

illuminations. Participants were forbidden to kill what they caught.
For sport only, the chase lasted several days interspersed with
festivities.
Because life was collective, it was intensely sociable and
dependent on etiquette, hence the emphasis on courteous conduct
and clean ngernails. There was much washing of hands both before
and after meals, even though knives and spoons were in use and
forks, though rare, were not unknown. An individual basin was
brought to the lord and a washroom provided at the entrance to the
banquet hall where several people at a time could wash their hands
at a series of small water jets and dry them on a towel. For the lord’s
and lady’s baths, which were frequent, hot water was brought to a
wooden tub in the bedroom, in which the bather sat and soaked or,
in the case of one illustrated gentleman, bathed in a tub in his
garden looking ineably smug under the loving attentions of three
ladies. For lesser residents, a room for communal bathing was
generally arranged near the kitchen.
Two meals a day were customary for all, with dinner at ten A.M.
and supper at sundown. Breakfast was unknown except possibly for
a piece of dry bread and glass of wine, and even that was a luxury.
Fine dressing could not be suppressed despite ever-renewed
sumptuary laws which tried especially and repeatedly to outlaw the
pointed shoes. Even when stued at the toe to make them curl up or
tied at the knee with chains of gold and silver, the poulaines
produced a mincing walk that excited ridicule and charges of
decadence. Yet the upper class remained wedded to this particular
frivolity, which grew ever more elegant, made sometimes of velvet
sewn with pearls or gold-stamped leather or worn with a dierent
color on each foot. Ladies’ surcoats for the hunt were ornamented
with bells, and bells hung too from belts, which were an important
item of clothing because of all the equipment they carried: purse,
keys, prayer book, rosary, reliquary, gloves, pomander, scissors, and
sewing kit. Undershirts and pants of ne linen were worn; furs for
warmth were ubiquitous. In the trousseau of the unfortunate
Blanche de Bourbon, who unwisely married Pedro the Cruel, 11,794

squirrel skins were used, most of which were imported from
Scandinavia.
In church, nobles often left the moment mass was over, “scarcely
saying a Paternoster within the Church walls.” Others more devout
carried portable altars when they traveled and contributed alms set
by their confessors for penance, although the alms amounted on the
whole to far less than they spent on clothes or the hunt. Devout or
not, all owned and carried Books of Hours, the characteristic
fashionable religious possession of the 14th century noble. Made to
order with personal prayers inserted among the day’s devotions and
penitential psalms, the books were marvelously illustrated, and not
only with Bible stories and saints’ lives. In the margins brimming
with burlesque, all the comic sense, fantasy, and satire of the Middle
Ages let itself go. Buoons and devils curl and twist through
owering vines, rabbits ght with soldiers, trained dogs show their
tricks, sacred texts trail o into long-tailed fantastical creatures,
bare-bottomed monks climb towers, tonsured heads appear on
dragons’ bodies. Goat-footed priests, monkeys, minstrels, owers,
birds, castles, lusting demons, and imaginary beasts twine through
the pages in bizarre companionship with the sanctity of prayer.
Often in religious observance the sacred mixed with the profane.
When mass was celebrated for rulers, complained a bishop, they
held audience at the same time, “busying themselves with other
things and paying no attention to the service nor saying their
prayers.” The sacrament of the Eucharist celebrated in the mass, in
which the communicant, by partaking of the body and blood of
Christ, is supposed to share in the redeeming sacrice of the cross
and in God’s saving grace, was the central rite of Christianity and
the prerequisite for salvation. Clouded by the metaphysics of
transubstantiation, it was little understood by the ordinary layman,
except for the magical powers believed to reside in the consecrated
wafer. Placed on cabbage leaves in the garden, it kept o chewing
insects, and placed in a beehive to control a swarm, it induced the
pious bees, in one case, to build around it a complete chapel of wax
with windows, arches, bell tower, and an altar on which the bees
placed the sacred fragment.

Even so, communion and confession, which were supposed to be
observed every Sunday and holy day, were on the average practiced
hardly more than the obligatory once a year at Easter. A simple
knight, on being asked why he went not to mass, so important for
the salvation of his soul, replied, “This I knew not; nay, I thought
that the priests performed their mass for the oerings’ sake.” For
northern France it has been estimated that about 10 percent of the
population were devout observers, 10 percent negligent, and the
rest wavered between regular and irregular observance.
At the moment of death, however, people took no chances: they
confessed, made restitutions, endowed perpetual prayers for their
souls, and often deprived their families by bequests to shrines,
chapels, convents, hermits, and payments for pilgrimages by proxy.
King Charles, according to his admiring biographer Christine de
Pisan, daughter of Thomas the astrologer, was zealous in piety. He
made the sign of the cross as soon as he awoke and spoke his rst
words of the day to God in his prayers. When combed and dressed,
he was brought his breviary, recited the canonical hours with his
chaplain, celebrated high mass in his chapel at eight A.M. with
“melodious song” and low mass afterward in his private oratory.
Then he held audience for “all manner of people, rich and poor,
ladies and damsels, widows and others.” On xed days he presided
over matters of state at the Council. He lived consciously with
“majestic regularity” to show that the dignity of the crown must be
maintained by solemn order. After midday dinner he listened to the
minstrels play sweetly “to rejoice the spirit,” and then for two hours
received ambassadors, princes, and knights, often such a crowd that
“in his great halls one could hardly turn around.” He listened to
reports of battles and adventures and news of other countries,
signed letters and documents, assigned duties, and distributed and
received gifts. After an hour’s rest, he spent time with the Queen
and his children—a son and heir was born in 1368 and afterward a
second son and two daughters—visited his gardens in summer, read
and studied in winter, talked with his intimates until supper, and

after the evening’s entertainment, retired. He fasted one day a week
and read the Bible through each year.
Whatever his true paternity, Charles possessed to the full the
Valois passion for acquisitions and luxury. He was already
reconstructing Vincennes for a summer palace and would soon build
or acquire three or four more. He employed the famous chef
Taillevent, who served up roasted swan and peacocks reconstructed
in all their feathers with gilded beaks and feet and resting on
appropriate landscape made of spun sugar and painted pastry. He
collected precious objects and gem-studded reliquaries to house the
piece of Moses’ rod, the top of John the Baptist’s head, the ask of
Virgin’s milk, Christ’s swaddling clothes, and bits and pieces of
various instruments of the crucixion including the crown of thorns
and a fragment of the True Cross, all of which the royal chapel
possessed. At his death he was to own 47 jeweled gold crowns and
63 complete sets of chapel furnishings including vestments,
altarpieces, chalices, liturgical books, and gold crucixes.
Thirty years old in 1368, two years older than Enguerrand de
Coucy, the King was pale, thin, and grave, with a long sinuous
prominent nose, sharp eyes, thin closed lips, sandy hair, and
carefully controlled feelings. Through a hard school, he had learned
to keep his thoughts to himself, so that he was accused of being
subtle and secret. He had recovered from the severe headaches,
toothaches, dyspepsia, and other ailments which aicted him
during his regency, but still suered from a malady—perhaps gout
—of the right hand or arm and a mysterious stula and abscess of
the left arm, probably from tuberculosis, but supposed to be the
result of the attempt by Charles of Navarre to poison him in 1358. A
learned physician from Prague, sent to him by his uncle the
Emperor, treated the poison, but told him that if ever the abscess
should cease oozing, Charles would die after fteen days in which
he would have time to settle his aairs and attend to his soul. Not
surprisingly, the King lived under a sense of urgency.
As a man of inquiring mind, interested in cause and eect, and in
philosophy, science, and literature, he formed one of the great
libraries of his age, which was installed in the Louvre, where he

maintained a second residence. The library’s rooms were paneled in
carved and decorated cypress, stained-glass windows were screened
by iron wire against “birds and other beasts,” and a silver lamp was
kept burning all night so that the King could read at any time. Not
knowledge only but the spread of knowledge concerned him. He
commissioned Nicolas Oresme, a learned councillor of advanced and
scientic mind, to explain the theory of stable currency in simple
language; it was this kind of statecraft that earned him the title of
Charles le Sage (the Wise). He commissioned translations into
French of Livy, Aristotle, and Augustine’s City of God “for the public
utility of the realm and all Christendom,” and owned many other
classics, works of the church fathers, and Arab scientic treatises in
French translation. The library was eclectic, ranging from Euclid,
Ovid, Seneca, and Josephus to John of Salisbury, the Roman de la
Rose, and a then current best seller, Sir John Mandeville’s Travels. It
contained the various 13th century encyclopedias of universal
knowledge, a collection of works on the crusades and on astrology
and astronomy, 47 Arthurian and other romances, codes,
commentaries and grammars, works of philosophy, theology,
contemporary poetry, and satire—in all, according to an inventory
of 1373, over 1,000 volumes, ultimately the nucleus of the national
library of France. When reproached for spending too much time
with books and clerks, Charles answered, “As long as knowledge is
honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”
His three brothers were all compulsively acquisitive: Louis
d’Anjou, eldest of the three, for money and a kingdom; Jean de
Berry for art; Philip of Burgundy for power. Tall, robust, and blond
like his father, Anjou was headstrong, vain, and driven by insatiable
ambition. Berry, sensual and pleasure-loving, was the supreme
collector, whose square common pug-nosed face and thick body
consorted oddly with his love of art. Philip of Burgundy had Berry’s
coarse heavy features but greater intelligence and an overweening
pride. Each put his own interests above the kingdom’s, each was
given to conspicuous consumption to enhance and display his
prestige, and each was to produce through his patronage works of
art unsurpassed of their kind: the Apocalypse series of tapestries

made for Anjou, the Très Riches Heures and Belles Heures illuminated
for Berry by the brothers Limbourg, and the statues of the Well of
Moses and the Mourners sculpted by Claus Sluter for Burgundy.
Never did princely magnicence display itself more noticeably
than on two occasions in 1368–69 in which Coucy shared. His
brother-in-law, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a widower and father at
29, came to Paris in April 1368 on his way to Milan to marry
Violante Visconti, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Galeazzo.*
Accompanied by a retinue of 457 persons and 1,280 horses (perhaps
the extras were for gifts), he was lodged in a suite especially
decorated for him at the Louvre. His sister, the Dame de Coucy, and
Enguerrand came to Paris to meet him and to join in the feasts and
honors with which the King and his brothers during the next two
days overwhelmed their late enemy.
Another conspicuous guest was Enguerrand’s cousin and the
bride’s uncle Amadeus VI of Savoy, called “the Green Count” from
the occasion of his knighthood at nineteen when he had appeared in
a series of tournaments wearing green plumes, green silk tunic over
his armor, green caparisons on his horse, and followed by eleven
knights all in green, each led into the lists by a lady in green leading
her champion’s horse by a green cord. Amadeus yielded to no one in
ostentation. While in Paris, where the shops were displaying their
nest goods for the occasion, the Green Count enjoyed a shopping
spree, leaving orders for jeweled necklaces, table knives, boots,
shoes, plumes, spurs, and straw hats. He gave the King a “chapel” of
rubies and large pearls costing 1,000 orins and bestowed three
gold francs on Guillaume de Machaut for a romance presented to
him by the poet. He took home to his wife four lengths of cloth of
Reims costing 60 francs and a jaquette lined with 1,200 squirrel
skins.
Dinners and suppers, dancing and games at St. Pol and the Louvre
crowded Clarence’s visit, including an elaborate banquet which cost
the Duke of Burgundy 1,556 livres. All the abundant species of
game, sh, and fowl then inhabiting the woods and rivers, as well as
domestic meats especially fattened for the table, were available for
eating. Forty kinds of sh and thirty dierent roasts appear among

the recipes of the time. On Clarence’s departure the King presented
him and his suite with gifts valued at “20,000” orins, part of a
routine of gift-giving that, besides exhibiting the status of the giver,
was useful to the receiver, who could turn the gifts into cash by
pawning.
The acme of ostentation awaited in Milan. To have bought a
daughter of the King of France for his son and now a son of the King
of England for his daughter was a double triumph for Galeazzo
Visconti and one more marvel in the notoriety of the Vipers of
Milan, so called from the family device of a serpent swallowing a
struggling human gure, supposedly a Saracen. Two Visconti ruled
jointly in Lombardy—Galeazzo and his more terrible brother,
Bernabò. Murder, cruelty, avarice, eective government alternating
with savage despotism, respect for learning and encouragement of
the arts, and lusts amounting to sexual mania characterized one or
another of the family. Lucchino, an immediate predecessor, had
been murdered by his wife, who, after a notable orgy on a river
barge during which she entertained several lovers at once including
the Doge of Venice and her own nephew Galeazzo, decided to
eliminate her husband to forestall his same intention with regard to
her. The debaucheries of Matteo, eldest brother of Bernabò and
Galeazzo, were such that he endangered the regime and was
disposed of by his brothers in 1355, the year after their accession,
“dying like a dog without confession.”
War with the papacy, from which they had seized Bologna and
other efs of the Holy See, was the Visconti’s major activity. When
excommunicated by the Pope in the course of the war, Bernabò
compelled the legate who brought him the Bull of Excommunication
to eat it, including silken cord and seals of lead. He was supposed to
have had four nuns burned and an Augustinian monk roasted alive
in an iron cage for no known reason unless it was malice toward the
Church.
Greedy, crafty, cruel, and ferocious, given to paroxysms of rage
and macabre humor, Bernabò was the epitome of the unbridled
aristocrat. If any of his 500 hunting dogs was not in good condition,
he would have the keepers hanged and all poachers as well. The

Quaresima, a forty-day program of torture attributed to Bernabò and
his brother, supposedly issued as an edict on their accession, was a
catalogue so lurid as to make one hope it was intended to frighten,
rather than for actual use. With the strappado, the wheel, the rack,
aying, gouging of eyes, cutting o of facial features and limbs one
by one, and a day of torture alternating with a day of rest, it was
supposed to terminate in death for “traitors” and convicted enemies.
In his personal habits Bernabò was dedicated “to an astonishing
degree to the vice of lust, so that his household appeared to be more
the seraglio of a sultan than the habitation of a Christian prince.” He
fathered seventeen children by his wife, Regina, said to be the only
person who could approach him in his mad moods, and more than
that number of illegitimate children by various mistresses. When
Bernabò rode through the streets, all citizens were obliged to bend
the knee; he would frequently say he was God on earth, Pope and
Emperor in his own domain.
Bernabò ruled in Milan, his brother Galeazzo in the ancient city of
Pavia twenty miles away. More than 100 towers darkening Pavia’s
narrow streets testied to the incessant strife of Italian towns.
Galeazzo’s great square castle, just completed in 1365, was built
into the northern wall of the town, overlooking gardens and fruitful
countryside. Called by the chronicler Corio with patriotic pride “the
rst palace of the universe,” and by a later admirer “the nest
dwelling place in Europe,” it was built of rose-red brick baked from
Lombard clay, and boasted 100 windows surrounding a magnicent
courtyard. Petrarch, who for eight years was an ornament of the
Visconti court, described its crown of towers “rising to the clouds,”
where “in one direction could be seen the snowy crest of the Alps
and in the other the wooded Apennines.” On a balcony overlooking
the moat, the family could dine in summer, refreshed by the sight of
water and a view of gardens and forested park rich in game.
A less melodramatic tyrant than his brother, Galeazzo was sober
in personal habits and devoted to his wife, the “good and gentle”
Blanche of Savoy. He wore his red-gold hair long, in braids or loose,
or “sometimes resting on his shoulders in a silken net or garlanded
with owers,” and he suered grievously from gout—“the malady of

the rich,” as it was called by the Count of Flanders, who suered
from it too.
The wedding of Lionel of England and Violante Visconti was to be
held in Milan, leading city of Lombardy and inland rival of Venice
and Genoa. As the center for trade below the Alps, it had dominated
northern Italy for a thousand years. Its marvels, recorded by a friar
of the previous century, included 6,000 fountains for drinking
water, 300 public ovens, ten hospitals of which the largest
accommodated 1,000 patients two to a bed, 1,500 lawyers, forty
copyists of documents, 10,000 monks of all orders, and 100
armorers manufacturing the famous Milanese armor. By mid-14th
century it was subject to the general habit of deploring decadence in
comparison with the good simple days of yore. Men were reproved
for extravagant fashions, especially if foreign—tight garments “in
the Spanish manner,” monstrous spurs like the Tatars’, adornment
with pearls after the French fashion. Women were reproved for
frizzled hair and gowns that bared their breasts. Milan had so many
prostitutes, it was said, that Bernabò taxed them for revenue to
maintain the city walls.
On arrival in Milan, Lionel was accompanied, in addition to his
own suite, by 1,500 mercenaries of the White Company, which had
switched from the Pope’s service to that of the Visconti. Eighty
ladies all dressed alike—as was customary to enhance the pageantry
of great occasions—in gold-embroidered scarlet gowns with white
sleeves and gold belts, and sixty mounted knights and squires also
uniformly dressed came in the train of Galeazzo to greet him. In
addition to a dowry for his daughter so extensive that it took two
years to negotiate, Galeazzo paid expenses of 10,000 orins a month
for ve and a half months for the bridegroom and his retinue.
The stupendous wedding banquet, held outdoors in June, left all
accounts gasping. Its obvious purpose was to testify to “the
Largeness of Duke Galeas his soul, the full satisfaction he had in this
match and the abundance of his coers.” Thirty double courses of
meat and sh alternated with presentation of gifts after each course.
Under the direction of the bride’s brother, Gian Galeazzo the
younger, now seventeen and father of a two-year-old daughter, the

gifts were distributed among Lionel’s party according to rank. They
consisted of costly coats of mail, plumed and crested helmets, armor
for horses, surcoats embroidered with gems, greyhounds in velvet
collars, falcons wearing silver bells, enameled bottles of the choicest
wine, purple and golden cloth and cloaks trimmed with ermine and
pearls, 76 horses including six beautiful little palfreys caparisoned
in green velvet with crimson tassels, six great war-horses in crimson
velvet with gold rosettes, and two others of extra quality named
Lion and Abbott; also six erce strong daunts or war-dogs,
sometimes used with cauldrons of aming pitch strapped to their
backs, and twelve splendid fat oxen.
The meats and sh, all gilded,* paired suckling pigs with crabs,
hares with pike, a whole calf with trout, quails and partridges with
more trout, ducks and herons with carp, beef and capons with
sturgeon, veal and capons with carp in lemon sauce, beef pies and
cheese with eel pies, meat aspic with sh aspic, meat galantines
with lamprey, and among the remaining courses, roasted kid,
venison, peacocks with cabbage, French beans and pickled ox-
tongue, junkets and cheese, cherries and other fruit. The leftover
food brought away from the table, from which servants customarily
made their meal, was enough, it was said, to feed a thousand men.
Among those who shared the feast were Petrarch, an honored guest
at the high table, and both Froissart and Chaucer among the
company, although it is doubtful if the two young unknowns were
introduced to the famous Italian laureate.
Never did Fortune’s Wheel come down with such a crash; never
was vainglory so reprimanded. Four months later, while still in
Italy, the Duke of Clarence died of an undiagnosed “fever,” which
naturally raised cries of poison, although, since it destroyed the
inuential alliance that Galeazzo had bought at such enormous
expense, the cause was more likely the delayed eect of all those
gilded meats in the heat of the Lombardy summer. Violante’s fate
was no happier. She was next married to a half-mad sadist, the
seventeen-year-old Marquis of Montferrat, who was given to
strangling boy servants with his own hands. After his violent death
she married a rst cousin, one of Bernabò’s sons, who came to a

violent end at the hands of her brother. She died at 31, three times a
widow.
Twelve months after the Visconti wedding, Enguerrand de Coucy
was an envoy of the King at a wedding of greater political
signicance 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
ve 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 coers 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 eort 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, aecting 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 oerings 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 nest
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 gure, 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 aiction 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 suering 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 gures 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 nally be defeated at
Armageddon, ushering in the reign of Christ and a new age.

His name was Giovanni or Gian Galeazzo, but the shorter form is used to
distinguish him from his son, Gian Galeazzo the younger.

With a paste of powdered egg yolk, saron, and our sometimes mixed with
real gold leaf.

Chapter 12

A
Double Allegiance
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, ght
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
justication 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 ttingly 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 rst oath and send a substitute to ght for the other—an
ingenious but expensive solution. Coucy could not be compelled by
King Edward to ght 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 conscated.

His rst 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 gure 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 gure 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
gure, 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 gure
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 eect 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 eort to enlist the Emperor’s inuence 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 nance 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 benet and
protracted them as long as they could, while the hapless population
suered the eects. 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 eort 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 eort to reconquer the Papal States collided with
the expansion of Milan under the Visconti who had seized Bologna,
a papal ef, 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 beneces 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.
Born Guillaume de Grimoard of a noble family of Languedoc,
Urban was a sincerely devout man, a former Benedictine monk, who
genuinely desired to restore the credibility of the Church and revive
papal prestige. He reduced multiple beneces, raised the
educational standards for priests, took stern measures against usury,
simony, and clerical concubinage, forbade the wearing of pointed
shoes in the Curia, and did not endear himself to the College of
Cardinals. He had not been one of them but a mere Abbot of St.
Victor’s in Marseille when elected. His elevation over higher-ranking
candidates, including the ambitious Talleyrand de Périgord, had
been owed only to the inability of the cardinals to agree on one of
themselves, but the public thought this astonishing departure
outside their own group must have been inspired by God. According
to Petrarch, pursuing his favorite theme, only the Divine Spirit could
have caused such men as the cardinals to suppress their own
jealousies and ambitions and open the way for elevation of a Pope
who would return the papacy to Rome.
This Urban intended to do as soon as he should have rm control
over the patrimony of St. Peter. Among the devout everywhere, the
yearning for return to Rome was an expression of their yearning for
a purifying of the Church. If the Pope shared that sentiment, he also
recognized that return was the only means of controlling the
temporal base, and he understood the necessity of terminating what
the rest of Europe saw as French vassalage. It was clear that the
longer the papacy remained in Avignon, the weaker became its
authority and the less its prestige in Italy and England. Over the
violent objections of the cardinals, and the resistance of the King of
France, Urban was determined upon return.

In Italy, Bernabò was not the only enemy of priests. Francesco
Ordela, despot of Forlì, responded to excommunication by causing
straw-stued images of the cardinals to be burned in the market
place. Even Florence, though allied on and o with the papacy out
of need to resist Milan, was anti-clerical and anti-papal in spirit. The
Florentine chronicler Franco Sacchetti excused Ordela’s vicious
mutilation of a priest on the ground that he had not acted from the
sin of avarice and that it would be a good thing for society if all
priests were treated in the same way.
In England they had a saying, “The Pope has become French and
Jesus English.” The English were increasingly resentful of the papal
appointment of foreigners to English beneces, with its
accompanying drain of English money outside the country. In their
growing spirit of independence, they were already moving toward a
Church of England without being aware of it.
In April 1367 Urban carried out the great removal, sailing from
Marseille over the wailing of the cardinals, who are reported to have
shrieked aloud, “Oh, wicked Pope! Oh, Godless brother! Whither is
he dragging his sons?” as if he were taking them into exile instead
of out of it. Reluctant to leave the luxuries of Avignon for the
insecurity and decay of Rome, only ve of the college in the rst
instance accompanied him. The greater part of the huge
administrative structure was left at Avignon.
Urban’s rst landfall was at Leghorn, where Giovanni Agnello, the
Doge of Pisa, an “odious and overbearing” ruler, came to meet him
escorted by Sir John Hawkwood and 1,000 of his men-at-arms in
their glittering mail. At the sight, the Pope trembled and refused to
disembark. It was not a propitious omen for return to the Eternal
City.
The malign spirit of the 14th century ruled over the return. Only
when he had assembled a temporal army and an imposing escort of
Italian nobles was the Holy Father able to enter the capital city of
Christendom, now sadly disheveled. Dependent formerly on the
immense business of the papal court, Rome had no thriving
commerce like that of Florence or Venice to fall back on. In the
absence of the papacy it had sunk into poverty and chronic disorder;

the population dwindled from over 50,000 before the Black Death to
20,000; classical monuments, tumbled by earthquake or neglect,
were vandalized for their stones; cattle were stabled in abandoned
churches, streets were pitted with stagnant pools and strewn with
rubbish. Rome had no poets like Dante and Petrarch, no “invincible
doctor” like Ockham, no university like Paris and Bologna, no
ourishing studios of painting and sculpture. It did harbor one
notable holy gure, Brigitta of Sweden, who was kind and meek to
every creature, but a passionate denouncer of the corruption of the
hierarchy.
For a moment in 1368, the arrival of the Emperor in Lombardy to
make common cause with the Pope against the Visconti seemed to
augur well. But little came of his eort, and the feuds and rivalries
resumed. In 1369 the ancient goal of reunion with the Eastern
Church seemed almost at hand when the Byzantine Emperor, John V
Paleologus, came to Rome to meet Urban in a magnicent ceremony
at St. Peter’s. He hoped to obtain Western help against the Turks in
return for rejoining the Roman Church, but this project too fell apart
when the churches could not agree on ritual.
Harassed by renewed revolt in the Papal States, threatened by a
massing of Bernabò’s troops in Tuscany, defeated and disillusioned,
Urban crept back to Avignon in September 1370. In deserted Rome,
Brigitta of Sweden predicted his early death for betraying the
Mother of Churches. Within two months he died, like King Jean of
an unspecied illness. Perhaps its name was despair.
In electing a successor, the cardinals thought to play safe with a
thorough Frenchman of great baronial family, the former Cardinal
Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who took title as Pope Gregory XI. He was
a pious and modest priest of 41, bothered by some debilitating
ailment from which he “endured much pain,” who, it was believed,
would have no spirit for the perils of Rome. Though a nephew of the
superb Clement VI, who had made him a cardinal at age nineteen,
Gregory did not have his uncle’s lordly ways, nor his prestige, nor
any particularly visible strength of character. The cardinals had
overlooked, however, the sometimes transforming eect of supreme
oce.

As soon as he was enthroned, Gregory, like his predecessor, felt
the force of the call to Rome, both in the cries of the religious and in
the political necessity of leaving Avignon and returning the papacy
to its home base. Reluctant and indecisive by nature, he might have
preferred a quiet life, but as Supreme Ponti he felt a sense of
mission. He could not move to Italy, however, until the Papal States
were made safe against the Visconti. For this purpose Urban had
organized a Papal League of various powers to declare war upon
Milan, which Gregory now inherited. In 1371 when Bernabò seized
further efs of the Holy See, the need for action was compelling.
In the same year, Amadeus of Savoy, the Green Count, entered
Piedmont, where his territory adjoined Milan, in pursuit of a local
war against one of his vassals. He was accompanied by his cousin
Enguerrand de Coucy, whom he appointed his Lieutenant-General
for Piedmont.
Enguerrand crossed the snowbound Alps with a company of 100
lances some time between November and March in the winter of
1371–72. Though impassable in the 20th century in winter, the
alpine passes were negotiated in all seasons by medieval travelers,
with the aid of Savoyard mountaineers as guides. People of the
Middle Ages were less deterred by physical hazards than their more
comfortable descendants. Monks of the local hospices and local
villagers, exempted from taxes for their service, kept paths marked
and strung ropes along the ridges. They guided parties of loaded
mules and pulled travelers on the ramasse, a rough mattress made of
boughs with ends tied together by a rope. Travelers wore snow
goggles or hats and hoods cut like masks over their faces. A
cardinal’s party with a train of 120 horses was seen crossing in one
November with the horses’ eyelids closed by the freezing snow. The
bodies of travelers overcome by storm, or who had failed to reach a
hospice by nightfall, were regularly cleared away by the guides in
spring.
From their trans-alpine perch, the Counts of Savoy exercised
control of the passes with great eect. The Green Count, Amadeus
VI, was a strong-willed enterprising prince whose father and Coucy’s
maternal grandmother had been brother and sister. Seventeenth of

his dynasty, brother-in-law of the Queen of France, founder of two
orders of chivalry, leader of the crusade which had expelled the
Turks from Gallipoli in 1365 and restored the Emperor of Byzantium
to his throne, Amadeus despised mercenaries as “scoundrels” and
“nobodies”—and hired them nonetheless. On occasion he was not
above bribing them to betray their previous contracts. For
operations in Piedmont against the Marquis of Saluzzo in 1371, he
engaged the dreaded and brutal Anachino Baumgarten with his
German-Hungarian company of 1,200 lances, 600 briganti, and 300
archers. In the face of this threat, Saluzzo turned for support to
Bernabò Visconti, who sent him reinforcements.
At this point Coucy entered Piedmont as leader of the Savoyard
campaign. Clearly well schooled in standard practice, Coucy is
reported “wasting” Saluzzo’s territory and sending to Amadeus for
more men so as to strip the country more eectively. These tactics,
designed to induce surrender, rapidly succeeded. Coucy’s conquest
of three towns and siege of a fourth provoked a counter-oensive by
Bernabò in behalf of his ally. In reaction Amadeus joined the Papal
League against the Visconti, to the extreme distress of his sister
Blanche, who was married to Galeazzo Visconti. In recognition of
the 1,000 lances Amadeus promised to engage at his own expense,
the Pope named him Captain-General of the league forces in western
Lombardy.

In the ensuing struggle, the parties were entangled in a web of
relationships more important to themselves than to posterity.
Connected by marriage or vassalage or treaty in one way or another,
the belligerents shifted in and out of alliances and enmities like
chess pieces playing a gigantic game, which may account for the
strangely insubstantial nature of the ghting. The war was further
conditioned by the use of mercenaries, who, having no loyalties at
all, shifted overnight even more easily than their principals. The
lord of Mantua started as a member of the league and abandoned

the Pope to join Bernabò. Sir John Hawkwood, starting in the pay of
Bernabò, abandoned him to join the league. The Marquis of
Montferrat, heavily besieged by Galeazzo, subsequently married his
daughter, the widowed Violante. Amadeus and Galeazzo, reluctant
enemies linked by common devotion to Blanche, felt more
threatened by Bernabò than by each other, and ultimately came to a
private understanding. The war that engaged Enguerrand de Coucy
in Lombardy for the next two years was a snake pit of wriggling
fragments.
At Asti, focus of the Savoyard campaign, Coucy found himself in
August 1372 facing Sir John Hawkwood’s White Company, then in
the pay of the Visconti. Each of Hawkwood’s men, as described by
Villani, was served by one or two pages who kept his armor bright
so that it “shone like a mirror and thus gave them a more terrifying
appearance.” In combat their horses were held by the pages while
the men-at-arms fought on foot in a compact round body with each
lance, pointed low, held by two men. “With slow steps and terrible
outcry, they advanced upon the enemy and very dicult it was to
break or disunite them.” However, Villani adds, they did better at
night raids on villages than in open combat, and when successful “it
was more owing to the cowardice of our own men” than to the
company’s valor or moral virtue.
Troubled by gout and having no taste anyway for personal
combat, Galeazzo had sent his 21-year-old son in nominal command
of the siege of Asti. Called the Count of Vertu from the title acquired
by his childhood marriage to Isabelle of France, Gian Galeazzo was
tall and well built with the reddish hair and striking good looks of
his father, though his intellectual rather than his physical qualities
were what impressed most observers. The only son of devoted
parents, educated in statecraft but untried in war, the young
Visconti, himself the father of three, was accompanied by two
guardians under orders from his father and mother to keep him
from being killed or captured, which, they noted, “are frequent
events in war.” All too dutifully the guardians prevented Hawkwood
from the frontal assault he wanted to make, causing him, in
exasperation, to strike his tents and leave the camp. In consequence,

the Savoyards were able to relieve the city. When Bernabò halved
Hawkwood’s pay in penalty, he deserted to the papal forces. Shortly
afterward Baumgarten, the Savoyard mercenary, deserted to the
Visconti.
For the Savoyards, the relief of Asti, if something less than a
brilliant military victory, opened the way for the march on Milan.
Gian Galeazzo, returning without glory from his rst essay in arms,
came back to Pavia in time to be present at the death of his 23-year-
old wife, Isabelle of France. She died in the birth of their fourth
child, a son who survived her only seven months.
Enguerrand’s role at Asti, though not chronicled, must have been
prominent and possibly decisive in some way, for the Pope
immediately empowered his legate, the Cardinal of St. Eustache, “to
contract and make treaties, alliances and agreements with
Enguerrand, Lord of Coucy, on behalf of the Church,” with the
object of giving him command of papal troops which the Cardinal
was conducting to Lombardy. A rst payment to Coucy of 5,893
orins was authorized through a banker of Florence, “to be received
by hand,” on condition that if Coucy failed to carry out strictly the
terms of his agreement with the Cardinal, he must reimburse the
papal treasury by 6,000 orins.
At 20 orins per lance per month, the usual mercenary rate, the
sum indicates that the force assigned to Coucy numbered 300
lances, rather than the 1,000 originally promised by the Pope. Three
hundred lances was a normal-size company in the contracts of the
time, which ranged from 60 or 70 to 1,000 lances, of three mounted
men each, plus mounted archers, foot soldiers, and servants.
In December the Pope formally appointed Coucy Captain-General
of the papal company operating in Lombardy against the “sons of
damnation.” The appointment reected Gregory’s impatience with
Amadeus, who had undertaken to advance on Milan from the west,
but was still in Piedmont, defending his own territory against
Visconti forces. Coucy’s mission was to join Hawkwood, now in
papal employ, who had retired to Bologna after changing sides, and
was already marching westward again toward the hoped-for

envelopment of Milan. Coucy was to proceed with him toward a
junction with Amadeus which would complete the envelopment.
In February 1373 Amadeus at last entered Milanese territory,
having reached a pact of neutrality with Galeazzo. The hand of his
sister Blanche was clearly active in ending the unhappy family
situation in which her husband’s lands were being ravaged by her
brother. In their agreement Amadeus promised not to molest
Galeazzo’s territory, in return for Galeazzo’s promise not to give aid
to Bernabò against him. Galeazzo thus took himself halfway out of
the war, leaving Amadeus free to proceed against Bernabò without
fear of attack on his rear.
By January 1373 Coucy had joined Hawkwood somewhere east of
Parma, from which they continued to move toward Milan. On
February 26, just as they were approaching their goal, the Pope in
an astonishing about-face instructed Coucy to provide a safe-
conduct to the Visconti brothers to appear in Avignon before the
end of March.
Gregory had been taken in by an oer of the Visconti to negotiate,
which was merely Bernabò’s device for gaining time to assemble his
forces. While still rejoicing in his enemies’ anticipated submission,
Gregory wrote to commend Coucy for acting “bravely and forcefully
to foster the interests of the Church in Italy,” and to thank him for
that uncommon commodity, his “undivided loyalty.” Two days later,
discovering himself deceived by the Visconti, the Pope expressed his
pain and astonishment that Coucy had “entertained peace proposals
from the enemies of the Church.” He was ordered to listen to no
further propositions of this kind, but to carry out his mission in the
assurance that the Pope was resolved “never to negotiate.” In letters
to all concerned, Gregory beseeched more energetic action to eect
the junction.
Coucy and Hawkwood, after crossing the Po in April, reached the
hill town of Montichiari about forty miles east of Milan. By this time
Amadeus had circled Milan to the north and after a long pause,
supposedly caused by agents of Bernabò poisoning his provisions,
had proceeded to a point no more than fty miles distant from
Coucy and Hawkwood. Here he came to a stop, evidently to prepare

a defensive position against the advance of 1,000 lances under
Bernabò’s son-in-law, the Duke of Bavaria, who was said to be
approaching.
Between the two arms of the papal forces, Bernabò had
constructed dikes on the river Oglio which could be opened to ood
the plain and prevent the enemy’s passage. He had called for
reinforcements from Galeazzo to block the threatened envelopment
and “requite in good earnest” the Sire de Coucy and Giovanni
Acuto, as the Italians called Hawkwood. While precluded from
ghting his brother-in-law of Savoy, Galeazzo considered himself
free to act against the other arm of the enemy, that is, against Coucy
and Hawkwood. He sent his son at the head of a combined force of
Lombards and Baumgarten’s mercenaries, numbering altogether
more than 1,000 lances plus archers and many foot soldiers. Gian
Galeazzo, who was kept informed of the enemy’s strength and route
by the lord of Mantua, advanced condently in the knowledge of
numerical superiority.
At Montichiari the Coucy-Hawkwood force numbered 600 lances
and 700 archers besides some hastily assembled provisionati or
peasant infantry. Seeing himself vastly outnumbered, Coucy is said
to have handed the baton of command to Hawkwood on the
grounds of his greater experience and knowledge of Italian warfare,
but the course of events supports a contrary version—that he
himself launched the attack with the furia francesca for which his
countrymen were known. As the forces clashed, men-at-arms
“tangled so heavily against one another that it was a marvel to
behold.” Beaten back with heavy losses, Coucy would have been
overcome but for Hawkwood, who, according to Froissart, “came to
his aid with ve hundred because the lord of Coucy had wedded the
kynge of England’s daughter and for none other cause.” Though
taking heavy punishment, they managed to retreat to the hilltop
while Visconti’s mercenaries, believing victory won, broke apart in
the customary rampage of looting. Men of the companies always
presented a problem of control. Gian Galeazzo was inexperienced
and Baumgarten was either complacent or not present in person. He
is not mentioned in accounts of the battle.

Seizing their chance, Coucy and Hawkwood regrouped their
battered numbers and charged down upon Gian Galeazzo.
Unhorsed, with lance beaten from his hand and helmet from his
head, he was saved only by the valiant ghting of his Milanese men-
at-arms, who covered his escape from the eld but were themselves
overcome before the mercenaries could be reassembled. In an upset
as astonishing in miniature as Poitiers, the inferior papal force
triumphed and bore from the eld the Visconti banners and 200
prisoners including thirty high-ranking Lombard nobles good for
rich ransoms. The Pope pronounced the victory a miracle, and its
report, traveling swiftly to France, endowed Coucy with sudden
fame. In the small world of his time, fame was easily won; more
important was what he learned. Coucy never again indulged himself
in that reckless attack for which French knighthood as a whole had
so great an anity.
Militarily, Montichiari had little impact. It led to no junction with
Savoy because the Coucy-Hawkwood force, bloodied and depleted,
judged it rash to try to break through, and withdrew instead to
Bologna, to the great distress of the Pope. He kept pleading for the
junction with Savoy to crush Bernabò, that “Son of Belial.” He
promised Hawkwood that delayed payments would soon be made,
and covered Coucy with compliments on his “loyal and careful good
judgment, remarkable honesty and well-known prudence.”
Recognizing “by the test of experience your great decisiveness and
foresight,” the Pope renewed Coucy’s commission as Captain-
General in June. Hawkwood, whose company was the mainstay of
the force, was not one to give action without pay, and his unpaid
men were growing rebellious. Passing through Mantua, they
inicted such injury and thievery upon the citizens as caused the
lord of Mantua to complain to the Pope, who in turn begged Coucy
to restrain the “forces of the Church” from committing further
damage. The danger if not the irony of using brigands to restore
papal authority was becoming apparent.
By a brave ght through a narrow pass, the Count of Savoy broke
out of his position and was able to advance and join Coucy and
Hawkwood at Bologna, from where, all together, they marched

westward again in July. Again at Modena the mercenaries aroused
the fury of the citizens, which the Pope almost tearfully begged
Coucy to appease, especially as Modena belonged to the Papal
League. Reaching Piacenza in August 1373, the papal forces laid
siege to the city, but the eort petered out when Amadeus fell ill.
From that point, under heavy rains ooding rivers, assaults by
Bernabò’s troops, and general lack of enthusiasm, the oensive
disintegrated.
As captain of a force now thoroughly disorganized and
compromised, Coucy saw little future in the papal war. On the
grounds of long absence from his wife and children and his estate,
and the need to care for his aairs in his own war-torn country, he
applied for leave to return to France. Gregory graciously granted the
release on January 23, 1374, with further fulsome tributes to
Coucy’s loyalty, devotion, decisiveness, “great honesty,” and other
virtues “with which you have been endowed by the Almighty.”
Considering that Coucy was abandoning the cause, the excess of
attery may have been meant to cover an absence of cash, for the
money due him was not paid by the papal treasury until many years
later.
His departure may have been given added impetus by the
recurrence of the Black Death in Italy and southern France in 1373–
74. Under its inuence, Gregory’s war eort dwindled away.
Discouraged by illness, Amadeus concluded a separate peace with
Galeazzo and abandoned the Pope once his own interests in
Piedmont were preserved. Galeazzo on his part, fearing that
Bernabò’s policies would lead to destruction, was equally ready to
separate from his brother. Bernabò was said to have been so
enraged by the reconciliation with Savoy that he attempted to
assassinate his sister-in-law Blanche as its agent. Forced to make
peace with the Pope for the time being, he secured favorable terms
in a treaty of June 1374 by bribing papal councillors. Nothing had
been accomplished by either side in the war because no combatant
but the Pope—who could not make his will eective—had fought
for anything fundamental, and war is too unpleasant and costly a
business to be sustained successfully without a cause.

For Gian Galeazzo his second discomture was enough. He never
again took command of troops in battle. A skillful statesman who
was to bring the Visconti empire to the peak of its power, Gian
Galeazzo remained a melancholy man, oppressed perhaps by the
inability to govern without trickery and violence, and saddened by
family tragedies. After the loss of his wife and infant son, his eldest
son died at the age of ten and his second son at thirteen, leaving
him with an adored only daughter who was not to escape an
unhappy fate.
With the third advent of the plague, contagion was more strictly
controlled if no better understood. While it raged in Milan, Bernabò
ordered every victim to be taken out of the city and left to die or
recover in the elds. Any person who nursed a plague patient was to
be strictly quarantined for ten days; priests were to examine their
parishioners for symptoms and report to a special commission under
pain of death for failure; anyone who brought the disease into the
city was subject to the death penalty and conscation of property.
Venice denied entry to all ships suspected of carrying infection, but
with the ea and rat not yet implicated, the precautions, though
groping in the right direction, failed to stop the carrier. At Piacenza,
where Coucy’s war eort ended, half the population died, and at
Pisa, where the plague lasted two years, it was said to have wiped
out four fths of the children. The most famous death of 1374 was
Petrarch’s at age seventy, not of plague but peacefully in a chair
with his head and arms resting on a pile of books. His old friend
Boccaccio, soured and ill, followed a year later.
In the Rhineland, unconnected with the plague, a new hysteria
appeared in the form of a dancing mania. Whether it sprang from
misery and homelessness caused by heavy spring oods of the Rhine
that year, or whether it was the spontaneous symptom of a
disturbed time, history does not know, but the participants were in
no doubt. They were convinced that they were possessed by
demons. Forming circles in streets and churches, they danced for
hours with leaps and screams, calling on demons by name to cease

tormenting them or crying that they saw visions of Christ or the
Virgin or the heavens opening. When exhausted they fell to the
ground rolling and groaning as if in the grip of agonies. As the
mania spread to Holland and Flanders, the dancers appeared with
garlands in their hair and moved in groups from place to place like
the agellants. They were chiey the poor—peasants, artisans,
servants, and beggars, with a large proportion of women, especially
the unmarried. Sexual revels often followed the dancing, but the
dominant preoccupation was exorcism of devils. In the agony of the
times, people felt a demonic presence, and in their minds nothing
pointed more surely to. Satan’s handiwork in society than the
fashion for wearing pointed shoes, which they had so often heard
denounced in sermons. Something slightly insane about this
crippling frivolity made it in the common mind the mark of the
Devil.
Hostility to the clergy marked the dancers as it had the
agellants. In their anxiety to suppress a craze which menaced
them, priests performed as many exorcisms as they could while the
public watched, sharing in the presence of demons. Processions and
masses were held to pray for the suerers. The frenzy died out
within a year, although it was to reappear on and o over the next
two centuries. Whatever its cause, it testied to a growing
submission to the supernatural, of which the Pope took notice. In
August 1374 he announced the right of the Inquisition to intervene
in trials for sorcery, heretofore considered a civil crime. Because
sorcery was made to work by the aid of demons, Gregory claimed it
lay within Church jurisdiction.
On his return home, Coucy found his native country gaining the
advantage in the war for the rst time in thirty years. France now
had a King who, if no captain, was a purposeful leader with a
denite war aim—recovery of the ceded territories. During Coucy’s
absence in Italy, England had lost most of these territories, and her
three greatest soldiers as well: Sir John Chandos, the Captal de
Buch, and the Black Prince. Had Coucy been present and active

during this period of his country’s recovery, instead of neutralized
by his English marriage, he might well have taken the primary role
that went to Du Guesclin. As it was, Charles V, whose constant eort
was to win support of the great territorial barons on whom he had
to depend, made a special attempt to re-attach him. The title of Sire
de Coucy, according to a saying of the time, was held in the general
estimation “as high as that of King or prince.”
On Enguerrand’s return, he was summoned directly to the King,
who feasted him and asked for all the news of the papal war. From
Paris Enguerrand went home to rejoin his wife, “and if they had a
great meeting together there was reason enough,” assumed
Froissart, “for they had not seen each other for a great while.”
Marital reunion was followed by a notable honor oered to Coucy
when in November 1374 Charles V appointed him Marshal of
France, sending a knight under the royal banner to bring him the
insignia of oce. Still constrained by his double allegiance, Coucy
felt obliged to decline the baton. The King nevertheless assigned
him an annual pension of 6,000 francs on August 4, 1374, of which
he received a rst payment of 1,000 francs in November.
Far from clouding his name, Coucy’s departure from France rather
than take part in the war, and his steadfast neutrality thereafter,
were considered the epitome of honor on both sides, and served him
well by protecting his estates from English attack. During Knollys’
raid through Picardy of 1370, “the land of the lord of Coucy abode
in peace, nor was there any man or woman of it that had any hurt
the value of a penny if they said they belonged to the lord of
Coucy.” If they were robbed before their identity was made known,
they were paid back by double the amount. A French knight, the
Chevalier de Chin, took rather unchivalric advantage of this known
immunity by carrying a banner bearing the Coucy arms into a
furious scrimmage in Picardy in 1373. He caused great marvel
among the English at the sight of his banner, for they said, “How is
it that the Lord Coucy hath sent men hither to be against us when
he ought to be our friend?” Yet such was the condence in his

honor that they did not believe the banner and forbore to take
reprisals against his land “nor burn nor do any damage there.”
Charles’s planned strategy was avoidance of major battle while
exerting scattered military action at every vulnerable point, with as
much pressure as possible concentrated on Aquitaine. To recover
Castile as an ally, he sent Du Guesclin back to Spain in 1369 with
spectacular result. In a “marvelous grete and ferse batayle” near
Toledo the two half-brothers Don Enrique and King Pedro fought
with awful ax strokes hand to hand, “each cryinge theyre cryes,”
until Pedro was overcome and captured. Froissart always prefers the
noble version, but, according to a Spanish and possibly better-
informed chronicler, the capture was eected less honorably.
Surrounded and trapped in a castle, Pedro conveyed an oer to Du
Guesclin of six efs and 200,000 gold dobles if he would convey
him to safety. Feigning acceptance, Bertrand led the King out
secretly and promptly turned him over to Enrique. Confronted by
his brother, Pedro “set his hand on his knife and would have slayne
him without remedy,” had not an alert French knight seized him by
the leg and turned him upside down, whereupon Enrique killed him
with a plunge of his dagger, and recovered the crown.
For France the result was the invaluable addition of Castilian sea
power, and for England a renewed fear of invasion that cramped her
eort overseas. Thereafter one mischance after another befell the
English cause. The Black Prince was invalided by a contagious
dysentery that spread among the English and Gascons and, in his
case, gave way by a cruel irony to dropsy. With swollen limbs, he
was “weighed down by so great inrmity of body that he could
scarcely sit upon his horse,” and as he grew heavier and weaker
could not mount and was conned to bed. For the paragon of battle,
the man of action and incomparable pride, to be incapacitated at 38
by a humiliating disease was maddening, the more so when the
situation he commanded was deteriorating. The Prince fell into rage
and ill-temper. Before these came to a tragic climax, the next
mischance arose.
In the wind of national feeling, French nobles were answering the
crown, turning back transferred castles, forming small forces of 20,

50, or 100 men-at-arms to recover towns and strongholds in ceded
territories. In one such skirmish early in 1370 at Lussac between
Poitiers and Limoges, Sir John Chandos, seneschal of the region,
with a company of about 300 clashed with a French force at a
hump-backed bridge over the river Vienne. Dismounting to ght on
foot, he marched to meet his enemies “with his banner before him
and his company about him, his coat of arms upon him … and his
sword in his hand.” Slipping on the dew-moistened ground of early
morning, he fell and was struck by an enemy sword on the side of
his blind eye so that he failed to see the blow coming. The sword
penetrated between nose and forehead and entered the brain. For
some unexplained reason, he had not closed his visor. Stunned to
extra ferocity, his men beat o the enemy and, after blows and
bloodshed, turned directly to tears with all the facility of medieval
emotion. Gathering around the unconscious body of their leader,
they “wept piteously … wronge their handes and tare their heeres,”
crying, “Ah, Sir John Chandos, owre of chivalry, unhappily was
forged the glaive that thus hath wounded you and brought you in
parell of dethe!”
Chandos died the next day without recovering consciousness, and
the English in Guienne said “they had lost all on that side of the
sea.” As the architect and tactician of English victories at Crécy,
Poitiers, and Najera, Chandos was the greatest captain of his side if
not of both sides. Although the French rejoiced at the enemy’s loss,
there were some “right noble and valiant knights” who thought it a
common loss, for an interesting reason. Chandos, they said, was “so
sage and so imaginatyve” and so trusted by the King of England that
he would have found some means “whereby peace might have
ensued between the realms of England and France.” Even
knighthood knew the craving for peace.
A few months later the Black Prince came to his last act of war.
Territories were slipping from his hands, gnawed by forces under
the Duc d’Anjou, the King’s energetic lieutenant in Languedoc, and
by other forces under Du Guesclin. In August 1370 Charles’s policy
of piecemeal negotiation with towns and nobles regained Limoges,
whose Bishop, although he had taken the oath of fealty to the Black

Prince, easily allowed himself to be bought back by the Duc de
Berry, lieutenant for the central region. For a price of ten years’
exemption from excise taxes, the magistrates and citizens were glad
to go along. Limoges raised the eur-de-lys over its gates, and after
due ceremony Berry departed, leaving a small garrison of 100
lances, too small to avert what was to follow.
Enraged by the “treason” and vowing to make the city pay dearly
for it, the Black Prince determined to make an example that would
prevent further defections. Commanding from a litter, he led a
strong force, including two of his brothers and the elite of his
knights, to assault Limoges. Miners tunneled under the walls,
propping them with wooden posts which when red caused sections
of the wall to collapse. Plunging through the gaps, the men-at-arms
blocked the city’s exits and proceeded on order to the massacre of
the inhabitants regardless of age or sex. Screaming with terror,
people fell on their knees before the Prince’s litter to beg for mercy,
but “he was so inamed with ire that he took no heed to them” and
they passed under the sword. Despite his order to spare no one,
some great personages who could pay ransom were taken prisoner,
including the Bishop, upon whom the Prince cast “a erce and fell
look,” swearing to cut o his head. However, by a deal with the
Prince’s brother John of Gaunt, the Bishop escaped to Avignon,
carrying with him the fearful tale.
The knights who watched or participated in the slaughter were no
dierent in kind from those who wept so piteously for Chandos, but
the obverse of facile emotion in the 14th century was a general
insensitivity to the spectacle of pain and death. Chandos was
bewailed because he was one of themselves, whereas the victims of
Limoges were outside chivalry. Besides, life was not precious, for
what was the body, after all, but carrion, and the sojourn on earth
but a halt on the way to eternal life?
In customary punishment, Limoges was sacked and burned and its
fortications razed. Though the blood-soaked story, spreading
through France, doubtless cowed resistance for the moment, it
fostered in the long run the hatred of the English that fty years
later was to bring Joan of Arc to Orléans.

A hero’s career ended in the vengeful reprisal at Limoges. Too ill
to govern, the Prince turned the rule of Aquitaine over to John of
Gaunt, and at the same time suered the death of his eldest son,
Edward, aged six. In January 1371 he left Bordeaux never to return.
With his wife and second son, Richard, he went home to six more
years of the helpless life of an invalid.
With France now holding the initiative, England’s military
strategy was mainly negative. The object of Sir Robert Knollys’
savage raid through northern France in 1370 was to do as much
injury as possible in order to damage the French war eort and hold
back French forces from Aquitaine. His forces could rob villages and
burn ripe wheat in the elds as they marched, but could take no
fortied places nor provoke frontal battle. Without prospect of
either ransoms or glory, his knights grew disaected as they neared
Paris, yet their threat was suciently alarming to cause the
appointment of Du Guesclin as Constable in October.
A record of being four times taken prisoner suggests either a rash
or an inept warrior, but Bertrand was not a reckless plunger of the
type of Raoul de Coucy. On the contrary, he was cautious and wily,
and a believer in wearing down the enemy by deprivation and
attrition, which was why Charles chose him. His rst act was to
conclude a personal pact with a formidable fellow Breton, one-eyed
Olivier de Clisson, called “the Butcher” from a habit of cutting o
arms and legs in battle. The Breton team and its adherents harassed
and pursued Knollys, and when his company was split by the
defection of discontented knights, defeated it in combat on the
lower Loire. Snapping and biting here and there, or buying o
English captains too strongly installed, Du Guesclin’s forces
liberated piece by piece the ceded territories.
Crucial advantage was won at sea in June 1372 by the Castilians’
defeat of an English convoy o La Rochelle. The English ships were
bringing men and horses to reinforce Aquitaine and—more critically
—£20,000 in soldiers’ pay, said to be enough to support 3,000
combatants for a year. Informed by his spies of the expedition,
Charles called upon his alliance with King Enrique. The Castilian
galleons of 200 tons propelled by 180 oars manned by free men, not

chained criminals, were more maneuverable than the square-rigged
English merchantmen, which could not tack but only sail before the
wind. The Spaniards were commanded by a professional admiral,
Ambrosio Boccanegra, whose father had been admiral for Don Pedro
but, with a sharp eye for the Wheel of Fortune, had changed sides at
the right moment. The English commander was the Earl of
Pembroke, a son-in-law of King Edward, aged 25 with a bad moral
reputation and no known naval experience. Sailing into the bay, his
ships were rammed by the Castillans, who sprayed the English
rigging and decks with oil which they ignited by means of aming
arrows. From high poops or “castles” taller than the enemy’s, they
threw stones down upon the English archers. In a two-day battle the
English ships were burned, routed, and sunk. Among other losses,
the vessel carrying the money was sent to the bottom.
Loss of the money weakened England’s hold of Aquitaine, which
depended on payment of troops. Castilian control of the sea
endangered communication with Bordeaux and, worse, opened the
way to French raids on English shores. With just that in mind
Charles was at this time developing a naval base and shipbuilding
yards at Rouen, where the largest ships could ride up the Seine with
the tide. Rather than wait to be attacked at home, the aging King
Edward, now sixty, swore to go overseas himself “with such
puissance that he would abide to give battle to the whole power of
France.”
Assembling another eet by the usual method of “arresting”
merchant ships with their own masters and crews, and taking with
him the ailing Black Prince and John of Gaunt, King Edward sailed
with a large force at the end of August 1372, ready to brave the
Castilians, only to be defeated by the weather. Contrary winds that
prevailed for nine weeks repeatedly turned back the eet or held it
in port until it was too late in the year to go. The King had to give
up the attempt at a cost of enormous expenditure in provisions and
equipment, in pay and maintenance of mariners and men-at-arms, in
cessation of trade and economic loss to the shipowners, and, not
least, in growing discontent with the war.

Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet
in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of
weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing
the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to
conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of
adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the
human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.
The naval asco led indirectly to the tragic fate of England’s third
great soldier, the Captal de Buch. While Edward’s eet oundered
oshore, the French were recovering La Rochelle and its hinterland,
and in the course of these combats the Captal was taken. He was
caught at night by a Franco-Castilian landing party under the
command of Owen of Wales, a protégé of France claiming to be the
true Prince of Wales. Though the Captal fought mightily by
torchlight, he was overpowered. Contrary to chivalric custom,
Charles held him in prison in the Temple in Paris without privilege
of ransom. The fate of the Captal became the wonder and dismay of
knighthood.
Political purpose was more important to Charles V than the
chivalric cult. He had never forgiven the Captal’s defection after the
Battle of Cocherel in 1364, when the Captal at rst turned French,
in response to Charles’s grant of large revenues, and then relapsed.
His heart belonged to his companion in arms, the Black Prince, and
when war was renewed in 1369, he repudiated his homage to the
King of France, gave back the properties, and rejoined the English.
Charles was now determined to keep him out of action.
Although King Edward oered to exchange three or four French
prisoners with ransoms worth 100,000 francs, Charles refused
absolutely to let the intrepid Gascon be ransomed, even though he
had been the rescuer of Charles’s wife and family at Meaux. While
the Captal languished, French nobles pleaded with the King not to
let a brave knight die in prison, but Charles said he was a strong
warrior who, if free to ght again, would recover many places.
Therefore he would release him only if he would “turn French,”
which the Captal refused to do. On being once more petitioned by a
group of which Coucy was this time the spokesman, the King

reected a little and asked what he might do. Coucy replied, “Sir, if
you asked him to swear he would never again take up arms against
the French, you could release him and it would be to your honor.”
“We will do it if he will,” said the King, but the gaunt and
weakened Captal said “he would never take such an oath if he had
to die in prison.” Left to that choice, never again to know his sword,
his horse, or his freedom, he succumbed to depression, wanted
neither to eat nor drink, gradually sank into coma, and died after
four years in prison in 1376.
Following Edward’s aborted expedition, the English made one
more eort. A new army was assembled which probably numbered
about 4,000 to 5,000 men despite the chroniclers’ “10,000” and
“15,000.” Led by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, without his
father or elder brother, both now unt for war, the army crossed to
Calais in July 1373 with the stated purpose of marching to the relief
of Aquitaine. It was the longest and strangest march of the war.
Although supposedly seeking decisive battle, in which the English
usually prevailed, Lancaster did not take the direct route southward,
where he would have encountered Du Guesclin’s forces on the way.
Instead he took the long way around, behind Paris, in a protracted
raid of pillage that led down through Champagne and Burgundy,
across the central highlands of Auvergne, and eventually, after ve
months and almost 1,000 miles, to Aquitaine. Probably the intention
of the famous, if indirect, oensive was to spread damage like
Knollys, with the added purpose of distracting the French from
organizing a possible invasion of England. Perhaps Lancaster simply
wanted a wider opportunity to nd knightly adventure and the
plunder necessary to make up the pay which the state could not
furnish.
Covering eight or nine miles a day in the usual three lines of
march, the better to live o the country and gather loot, the army
inicted wanton damage in order to provoke, through the
complaints of the inhabitants, the combat of French knights. This
failed, owing to Charles’s strict prohibition and because the
population was encouraged to take refuge inside fortied towns.
Lancaster’s march stretched out into the cold and rains of autumn;

provisions dwindled, horses starved and died, discomfort grew into
hardship and hardship into privation. The Duke of Burgundy’s men,
following on the army’s heels, picked o stragglers, local resistance
accounted for more losses, in the south Du Guesclin laid ambushes.
November was met on the wind-swept shelterless plateau of
Auvergne, knights without horses plodded on foot, some discarded
rusted armor, some as they entered Aquitaine were seen to beg their
bread. Of the wasted army that stumbled into Bordeaux at
Christmastime, half the men and almost all the horses had perished.
Enough were left to hold the old Aquitaine, now reduced to its
original boundaries, but not to regain what had been lost. By 1374
the Treaty of Brétigny had been nullied in fact as well as name.
Except for Calais, England was left with no more than she had held
before Crécy. The English had no way of holding territory without
the nancial means to maintain an army abroad nor, once war had
broken out, could they hold ceded regions whose population had
become hostile. Nor could military superiority conquer an opponent
who refused decisive battle. In August 1374 King Edward declared
his readiness to conclude a truce.
For both sides the time had come. Charles V, by using his head,
and Du Guesclin, by his unorthodox tactics, had combined to forge a
strategy based on recognition of the possible—the direct antithesis
of combat for honor, chivalry’s central principle. While
contemporary chroniclers and propagandists tried to make of Du
Guesclin the “Tenth Worthy” and Perfect Knight, and Charles’s
biographer Christine de Pisan insisted on eulogizing him for
everything but his real contribution, it was in truth the non-chivalric
qualities of these two hard-headed characters that brought France
back from ruin. Charles had succeeded in his war aim, but at the
cost of a ravaged and exhausted country. After some stalling, he
agreed to send envoys to a peace parley at Bruges.

Chapter 13

N
Coucy’s War
o peace treaty was reached at Bruges because the English
were determined to retain their former possessions in
France under their own sovereignty, while Charles V was
equally determined to regain the sovereignty of Guienne
yielded at Brétigny. His lawyers argued that the yielding of
sovereignty had been invalid because it violated the sacred oath of
homage, therefore the Black Prince and the King of England had
been guilty of rebellion comparable to that of Lucifer against God.
While this satised Charles’s life-long care to exhibit a lawful case,
it failed to impress the English. To avoid total waste of the parley,
which had been conducted at great expense and rival magnicence
by the Dukes of Burgundy and Lancaster (Burgundy received 5,000
francs a month in expenses), a one year’s truce beginning in June
1375 was agreed upon, with an undertaking to resume negotiations
in November.
Left unemployed by the truce, the companies in France reverted
to plundering the people they had lately liberated. More than a year
earlier, in January 1374, the royal government had attempted by a
sweeping ordinance to bring the units under control. The ordinance
provided for a system of authorized companies at xed rates of pay
under captains appointed by the crown who would be required to
forswear pillage and be held responsible, under pain of stated
penalties, for the conduct of their men. It was a conscientious eort,
but the Free Companies proved too much a part of the military
system to be either uprooted or domesticated. Their brigandage
continued.
“Greatly troubled” by this situation, the King took counsel with
his advisers on what he might do. They “bethought them of the Sire

de Coucy.” He was to be a new Pied Piper who could lead the
brigands out of France in a foreign war—his own.
Coucy’s case against the Dukes of Austria and his determination to
pursue it were well known. He could serve France in this matter,
unhindered by his ties to England. The proposal was put to him by
Bureau de la Rivière and Jean le Mercier, the King’s Chamberlain
and Treasurer, that if he would take into his service the companies
of some 25 captains from many parts of France and lead them
against the Hapsburg Dukes, the King would provide 60,000 livres
toward their pay and the expenses of the compaign. Especially he
was to remove the hard-bitten Bretons, followers of Du Guesclin and
Clisson, who had been committing terrible ravages since the end of
ocial war.
Coucy’s experience of mercenaries in Lombardy was enough to
teach him the dangers and undependability of such a command,
even though it promised him extraordinary aid toward his own
purpose. He was now 35, rich enough to loan money in that year to
the Duc de Berry but not to nance a campaign against the
Hapsburgs out of his own resources. He agreed to undertake the
great riddance.
Among the captains recruited to Coucy’s banner were the
Constable’s brother, Olivier du Guesclin, who had been occupying
and devastating the lands of the Duc de Berry, and his cousin
Sylvestre Budes, chief of a Breton company which had been the
bane of the Pope and the scourge of Avignon, where it plundered
even the wheat sent by the King to relieve a famine in 1375. In vain
the Pope had pleaded, negotiated, paid, excommunicated. He now
paid the Bretons 5,000 francs and agreed to revoke the
excommunication if they would go with Coucy. “Great terror”
spread through Burgundy as they moved northward up the left bank
of the Rhône; runners reported their advance, towns and villages
sent out heralds to recruit help. Like erce summer locusts, the
Bretons, joined by other companies, swept through Champagne in
July, into Lorraine in August, and into Alsace, which was part of the
Hapsburg domain within the Empire, in September.

Knights of Picardy, Artois, Vermandois, and Hainault came with
their squires and men-at-arms to “advance themselves in honor” in
Coucy’s enterprise. “Honor” in the lexicon of chivalry meant combat
against other knights, anticipated in this case against the Austrians.
The elasticity of the human mind allowed honor to be unaected by
partnership with mercenaries and brigands. Among the recruits
were Raoul de Coucy, Enguerrand’s uncle, the Vicomtes de Meaux
and d’Aunay and other seigneurs, and not least that celebrated and
busy warrior Owen of Wales. Son of a father executed by the King of
England, Owen had been brought up at the court of Philip VI.
Described as high-spirited, haughty, bold, and bellicose, he had
fought at Poitiers, in the Lombard wars of the 1360s, for and against
the Dukes of Bar in Lorraine, as a free-lance in Spain, and with Du
Guesclin in the campaigns of the 1370s, during which he had
returned from leading a naval raid on the Channel Islands to capture
the Captal de Buch.
In 1375 Owen was fresh from action at the successful siege of St.
Sauveur-le-Vicomte on the coast of Normandy, where for the rst
time cannon had been used with notable eect. Forty “engines”
great and small, projecting balls of iron and leather as well as stone,
failed to bring down the walls but so harassed the defenders that
they could not continue resistance. “They were so covered by the
engines that they did not dare go into the town or outside the castle
but stayed in the towers.” Even there one ball penetrated a room
where an English captain lay sick in bed and rolled around the walls
several times “as if the thunder itself had entered his chamber,”
convincing him his last hour had come, before it crashed through
the oor to the room below.
Under contract with Coucy dated October 14, 1375, the
prodigious Owen was to lead 400 men at a pay of 400 francs a
month plus another 100 francs for his lieutenant, Owen ap Rhys. He
was to take second place to no other captain and make no other
alliance until released, while Coucy in turn was to make no peace
without Owen’s agreement. Any town or fortress taken by Owen was
to be yielded to Coucy, but he could retain booty and prisoners
worth less than 200 francs in ransom. Of those worth more than

that, Coucy was to receive one sixth of the value, and in the event of
the Duke of Austria himself being captured, Owen was required to
deliver him to Coucy in return for payment of 10,000 francs.
The enterprise became a magnet for restless swords, attracting
from their annual Prussian sport 100 knights of the Teutonic Order.
The ink on the Truce of Bruges was hardly dry before English
knights too came riding to the rendezvous, attracted by the
leadership of the King of England’s son-in-law. Well armed, on ne
horses with silver bridles, wearing sparkling cuirasses and helmets
and magnicent long surcoats, the English, supposedly numbering
“6,000,” cast their fearful reputation over Coucy’s entire army with
the result that their opponents were to identify them all as
Engländer.
The total number, though vague, evoked awed estimates of forty,
fty, sixty, even one hundred thousand. Estimated by the number of
captains, it was probably somewhere around 10,000, comparable to
the army Du Guesclin led to Spain. An Alsatian chronicle mentions
16,000 knights “in helmets and hoods.” The pointed helmets and
cowl-like hoods on heavy cloaks worn against the cold were noticed
by all observers. Called Gügler (from the Swiss-German for cowl or
point), the hoods gave their name to what became known as the
Gügler War.
Before leaving, Coucy took care for the future of his soul in case
he met death. On a grand scale betting his rank, he endowed two
masses “every day and in perpetuity” at the Abbey of Nogent-sous-
Coucy for himself, his ancestors, and his successors. His instructions,
like most of their kind, were precise and specic, leaving nothing to
choice. The prayers were to be said in front of the image of Notre
Dame in the chapel, already designated as the site for his and his
wife’s tombs. One hundred livres a year were assigned for the
upkeep of the monks and the augmentation of Divine service. The
money was to be taken from “perpetual” rents and from the taille
due to Coucy from particular towns, specied to the exact penny, 50
livres from one, 45 livres and 10 sous from another, 4 livres and 10
sous from a third. Like his contemporaries, Coucy counted on a
perpetuity without change. He further donated to the monks of

Nogent for their sole use the rights to the sh in the river Ailette
over a given distance from the Rue de Brasse to the Pont St. Mard.
Solid and everlasting, Coucy’s bequest did not exhibit the urgency
of some donors. The Captal de Buch in a will of 1369, the year he
abandoned French fealty, evidently felt the need of immediate
sanction: he left 40,000 gold écus for 50,000 masses, all to be said
within a year of his death, plus perpetual lamps and additional
pious legacies.
These endowed chantries, ranging up to periods of thirty or fty
years or perpetuity, and usually including the relatives of the donor,
provided employment to the clergy and income to the churches.
Unattached priests with no other function could make a living from
the commissions and otherwise lead, as was popularly supposed, an
idle and dissolute life. The Princess of Wales maintained three
priests whose only duty was to say prayers for her deceased rst
husband.
While his assembled forces plundered Alsace for six weeks
through October and into November, Coucy still had not taken
command. His delay is the rst puzzle among many that cannot be
unraveled in this strange winter war because of gaps and
contradictions in the record. Did he postpone deliberately to add to
the chance of depleting the companies through the hardships of
winter? The fact that Du Guesclin too, in 1365, did not begin his
march across the Pyrenees until December suggests a pattern. But
Coucy was clearly intending to ght it out with his mother’s cousin
Leopold, not merely to lead the companies on a goose-chase over
the Jura and lose them somewhere in the mountain snows.
At the end of September he had written to the Duke of Brabant,
imperial Vicar in Alsace, informing him of his intention to reclaim
Brisgau, Sundgau, and the small county of Ferrette, and had
received an assurance that no imperial action would be taken to
oppose his eorts to obtain justice. Further to make a case for a just
war and distinguish himself from a mere captain of mercenaries,
Coucy also wrote to the towns of Strasbourg and Colmar in Alsace

disclaiming any threat against them, stating his claim against his
cousin, urging them not to take alarm but to aid him in obtaining
his rights, and oering to explain his case further if they wished.
This elicited no answer, since beneath the city walls the companies
were already doing their worst.
If the cry of horror in the local chronicles is evidence, never was
carnage worse than in Alsace. Forty villages in the Sundgau were
robbed and wrecked, 100 inhabitants of Wattwiller killed without
mercy, men and women seized to serve the brigands’ needs, the
Franciscan monastery of Thann burned to the ground, the convent
of Schoenensteinbach so ruined that it was abandoned and its lands
not cleared again for twenty years. The companies exacted their
usual tribute, which the rich paid in money, horses, and ne fabrics,
and the poor in shoes, horseshoes, and nails. When questioned as to
the purpose of their campaign, some captains reportedly replied that
they had come for “60,000 orins, sixty stallions t for combat, and
sixty garments of gold cloth.” The Bishop and magistrates of
Strasbourg paid 3,000 orins to ransom the city from attack. In one
place where a band of combative villagers succeeded in killing
twenty of the enemy billeted among them, they suered such
cruelties in retaliation that audacity gave way to despair and they
ed, abandoning their homes.
At the outset, the captains in Coucy’s pay had endeavored to
maintain discipline, and some hanged culprits almost daily in an
eort to stop the disorders. Against men habituated to lawless force,
violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control.
In the face of invasion, Leopold adopted the same strategy as had
Charles V: he ordered the Alsatians to destroy everything that could
aid, shelter, or feed the enemy and to retreat with their goods and
provisions within walled towns and castles. Like Charles, he ordered
the fortifying of towns and castles capable of defense, the razing of
others, and the burning of outlying villages. On paper such orders
are easily assumed; in practice, it would have been agony for a
peasant to destroy or see destroyed the product of his labor, the slim
margin of his life for another year. To what extent these drastic
measures were actually carried out is hard to judge.

Lacking sucient force to confront Coucy’s numbers, Leopold
withdrew into the fortress of Breisach across the Rhine and counted
on exciting the resistance of the self-reliant Swiss to repel the enemy
from further advance. He had painful reason to know the capacity
for combat of his Swiss subjects.
Whether real or legendary, William Tell’s deance of the Austrian
baili Gessler at the start of the century personied the struggle
against Hapsburg tyranny. Twice thereafter in the last sixty years
the Swiss had humiliated the Hapsburg cavalry. At Morgarten and
Laupen in 1315 and 1339 the victories of the man on the ground
over the mounted knight had made military history. At Morgarten in
the forest Canton of Schwyz, the Swiss, concealed above a mountain
pass, hurled down boulders and tree trunks on the knights as they
rode through the narrow dele, and then charged upon the
scrambled mass and slew them “like sheep in the hurdles.” They
gave no quarter, for they expected no ransom, and they carried the
eld because it was they and not their foe who had chosen where to
ght. The knights claimed terrain as the cause of defeat, and in fact
the disadvantage of cavalry in the mountains, where it could not
charge, was an element, no less than the deant spirit of the
cantons, in the ultimate gain of Swiss independence.
At Laupen on an open hillside, no excuse of terrain could explain
away the result. There the city levy of Berne, joined by mountain
men of the Forest Cantons, advanced under the command of a local
knight and took their position upon a hill requiring ascent by the
Hapsburg knights. In the clash the Swiss, though surrounded,
formed a “hedgehog” phalanx that stood its ground and withstood
penetration. While they engaged the knights in hand-to-hand
combat, inicting terrible wounds with their halberds—a
combination of ax and pike—their reserve fell upon the nobles from
behind and crushed them. Seventy crested helms and 27 noble
banners were carried from the eld. Though a generation had
passed since then, the Güglers might have taken warning.
The Swiss responded meagerly to Leopold’s summons for defense
against Coucy. They hated the Hapsburg more than they feared the
invaders. The three Forest Cantons in the center of the country

refused action. Led by Schwyz, boldest of the three and patronym of
the future nation, they said they had no interest in sacricing
themselves to defend Leopold’s territory against the Sire de Coucy,
who had never oended them. They would remain “spectators of
this war,” except to defend themselves against the victor if he
pushed his enterprises too far. Zürich, however, along with Berne,
Lucerne, and Solothurn agreed to defend the Aargau, the region
adjoining Alsace along the river Aar, because it touched their
borders and was their “boulevard.”

On or about St. Martin’s Day, November 11, Coucy with 1,500
men arrived in Alsace to take command. By now, with winter
approaching, the area had been thoroughly ravaged until no more
provisions or forage were to be found. At this juncture a startling
distortion of events occurs in the record which, coming from
Froissart, who was to learn much of Coucy’s history from his own
mouth, is inexplicable. Mutinous captains, according to Froissart,
called a meeting to accuse Coucy of deceiving them. “How’s this?”
they cried. “Is such as this the duchy of Austria? The Sire de Coucy
told us it was one of the fattest lands of the world and we nd it
poor. He has shabbily deceived us. If we were across the Rhine, we
could never return before we were all dead or captured by our
enemies the Germans, who are men without pity. Let us return to
France, and cursed be he who advances further!”
Suspecting he was about to be betrayed, Coucy spoke to them
softly, saying, “Sirs, you have taken my money and my gold for
which I am deeply indebted to the King of France, and you are
obliged by oath and by faith to acquit yourselves loyally in this
enterprise. Otherwise I shall be the most dishonored man in the
world.” But the companies refused to move, growling that the Rhine
was too wide to be crossed without ships, they did not know the
roads beyond, and “no one should take men-at-arms out of a good
country as you have done.”
The Rhine, which makes a right angle turn at Basle, would not in
fact have to be crossed to enter the Aargau, but it loomed large, if
not precisely located, in common knowledge. To the mercenary, the
world he traveled in was as vague in outline as the political purpose
for which he was being used. Coucy tried to persuade them that
once across the dark mountains they saw ahead they would nd
good land, but without avail. A message from Leopold at this point
oered to grant Coucy one of the territories he had demanded, the
county of Ferrette worth 20,000 francs a year, but the oer was
rejected because Coucy and his advisers considered it too small.
In Froissart’s version, Coucy on discovering that the men would
go no further was “greatly melancholy” and, “taking counsel with
himself as a wise and far-seeing knight,” he considered that the

mercenaries might well sell him to the Duke of Austria in lieu of
promised wages, “and if he should be delivered over to the Germans
he would never be freed.” After consulting with his friends, he
decided he had better return to France. With only two companions
he departed secretly at night “in disguise,” and had traveled two
days’ journey out of danger before any but close associates knew he
had gone. When he reached France, the King and his brothers were
“greatly astonished because they thought him in Austria and it
seemed to them that they saw three ghosts.” Asked to give an
account of himself, Coucy had no trouble in explaining the aair,
“for he was an eloquent speaker and had a true excuse.” He told the
King and Dukes everything that had occurred “so that it might be
seen that he was in the right and the companies to blame.”
The fact that nothing of the kind happened illustrates the problem
of medieval records. Coucy and the companies did indeed go
forward into the Aargau, leaving Alsace on St. Catherine’s Day,
November 25, and marching to Basle, where they paraded around
the city for three days in a display of strength, presumably to
discourage any opposition to their advance over the Jura. The
Bishop of Basle gave them free passage, it was said, out of hatred for
Berne.
At close hand, the purple darkness of the Jura was seen to be
pines covering a low range that did not rise above tree level. Riding
along a stream that rushed toward France in the opposite direction,
the hooded men-at-arms crossed over the crest, forced the passes at
Hauenstein and Blasthal, descended among the valley hamlets,
robbing and destroying as they went, until they came to the Aar, a
wide tributary of the Rhine marking the frontier of the Aargau.
Meeting little resistance, because lords of the region ed before the
invaders to take refuge with Leopold, they seized castles and the
ancient wooden bridge at Olten.
Urgently summoned by Leopold, the Bernese had advanced to
meet the enemy, but seeing the nobles abandon the territory, they
had turned in disgust and marched home. All Aargau in a fright
abandoned arms and villages for refuge in the towns, leaving the
Güglers masters of the countryside. Infuriated by the Bernese

disobedience, Leopold laid ruthless waste in front of the enemy. His
agents burned elds and harvests, felled trees, and left such a wake
of misery that little villages were hard pressed that winter to ght
o the wolves that came out of the forest. The embittered people
mocked the Austrians who “lay across the Rhine, safe as in a coer.”
They accused Count Rudolph of Nidau and other local lords of
opening the way to the torrent that would devastate the cantons.
Coucy’s men-at-arms swept up what they could nd. Dividing
themselves into three groups they spread out farther and farther
into the Aargau as hunger and plunder drove them. Coucy made his
headquarters less than ve miles east of the river in the Abbey of St.
Urbain, set with its back to a crescent of pine-covered hills and
looking out over a wide sweep of meadow land. According to the
abbey’s records, he stayed there eighteen days. The more important
cities of the Aargau had been made pledges for the unpaid portion
of his mother’s dowry. Had he been able to take these cities, his
personal goal might have been gained, but the scattering of his
forces and the strength of walls against men prevented it. He could
do no better than Edward had in France. Even the small town of
Büren in the Aar valley withstood a siege he conducted in person,
although its lord, the Count of Nidau, reaped the punishment of his
double-dealing when he put his head out of a window and was
killed by an enemy arrow.
In December’s cold the companies, hunting in small parties to
spread their foraging, penetrated to the frontiers of Zürich and
Lucerne. Their thinning out made them vulnerable at the same time
that their crimes were arousing Swiss deance. In Schwyz, near the
lake of Sempach, in the mountain district of Entlibuch, a stalwart
peasantry, proud of ancient privileges, assembled a body of several
hundred for action. Stirred by their example, the young men of
Lucerne, against city orders, climbed over the walls at night to join
them, along with others from surrounding towns. On December 19
the group, numbering about 600, surrounded the small town of
Buttisholz, where a company of “3,000” Güglers was billeted. The
Swiss attacked, slew 300, and burned others alive in a church where
they had taken refuge. The rest were put to ight. Triumphantly the

men of Entlibuch, with captured arms and trophies, rode back to
their mountains. Seeing them pass, a noble who had not fought
called mockingly from his castle to a mountaineer riding the war-
horse and wearing the helmet and cuirass of a dead knight, “Noble
sir of noble blood, should villeins wear such arms?” The Entlibucher
shouted back, “Sir, today we have so mixed the blood of nobles and
horses that one cannot be told from the other.” On the site of the
skirmish a monument was raised commemorating the Niederlage der
Gügler.
Berne, city of the Bear, took re from the news. Within six days a
force of Bernese and citizens of nearby towns, including Nidau and
Laupen, was assembled under the leadership of Berne’s chief
magistrate. On Christmas night the troop surprised a company of
Bretons at Jens fteen miles away and left another 300 Güglers
dead, evidently with minor loss to themselves, for they were ready
to march out again the next night.
Their objective this time was the Abbey of Fraubrunnen, where no
less an enemy than Owen of Wales was quartered with a large
company. Carrying the banner of the Bear, the citizens marched
through the night of the 26th in intense cold, and surrounded the
abbey before dawn. With loud yells and aming torches they red
the buildings and fell upon the sleeping “English,” killing many
before they woke. The rest sprang to their weapons in a desperate
defense: cloisters once accustomed to ceremonial silence rang with
the shouts and clang of battle, the contenders fought “stab for stab
and blow for blow,” smoke and ames lled every building of the
abbey, Owen swung his sword with “savage rage,” the Bernese
leader, Hannes Rieder, was killed, but his men forced the Güglers to
ight. “And those who ed were slain and those stayed were burned
up.” Owen escaped, leaving 800 of his men dead. The Swiss too
suered heavy losses, but the survivors carried glory back to Berne.
Among the captured banners still displayed in the city is a red-and-
white one, stained and torn, said to be Coucy’s.* Was he at
Fraubrunnen in person? His presence is nowhere mentioned but is
not impossible.

Berne decreed an annual distribution of alms in thanksgiving;
songs and chronicles celebrated the victory over the dreaded
companies which had so long harassed Christendom. Ballads told
how the “Knight of Cussin set out to seize castle and town,” with
“forty thousand lances in their pointed hats”; how he “thought the
land was all his and brought his kinsmen of England to help him
with body and goods”; how “Duke Yfo of Wales came with his
golden helm”; how the Bishop of Basle treacherously promised to
serve the Gügler, and how at last when Duke Yfo came to
Fraubrunnen,
The Bear roared “You shall not escape me!
I will slay, stab and burn you”;
In England and France the widows all cried,
“Alas and woe!
Against Berne no one shall march evermore!”
For posterity, Coucy’s role was recorded more soberly, if
inexactly, in Latin on a stone pillar erected at Fraubrunnen:
Seeking again the dowry of the beloved wife
Which the Austrian brother gave, Coucy, the English leader,
Led across the sea the standards of strong cohorts—
A knight attacking foreign elds far and wide.
In this place, on this ridge, the people of Berne
Destroyed the enemy camp and slaughtered many men
In this unjust war. Thus may Omnipotent God
Protect the Bear from the open [attacks] and secret stratagems
Of the enemy.
The voice of an aroused pride and condence sounds in these war
songs and memorials. The ghts at Buttisholz, Jens, and
Fraubrunnen in Christmas week of 1375, although they did not
destroy the Güglers, were greater in signicance than in size. They
re-energized the Swiss struggle against the Hapsburgs and propelled
it toward the decisive battle at Sempach in Schwyz eleven years
later in which Leopold was to be killed and the Hapsburg hold over

the cantons all but broken, although it took another century before
independence of the Confederation was denitely won. As catalyst,
Coucy’s expedition played an unhappy role in the growth of a
nation, not unlike the Black Prince’s massacre at Limoges. But if the
clashes he generated conrmed the ghting capacity of commoners
when engaged in their own cause, the lesson did not apply beyond
the Swiss and, to some extent, the Flemish. Other attempts like the
Jacquerie in the recurring civil struggles of the 14th century were
smashed.
After Fraubrunnen, Coucy was forced to turn back to France.
Against Leopold’s refusal to ght he could not regain his
inheritance, nor could he hold the companies any longer in a
scorched and empty country in freezing weather and in the sunken
morale left by defeats at the hands of the populace. Like Edward,
like Lancaster, like every invader of his time, he had set out to live
o the country with no chain of supply, and he met no dierent
result. The gloomy repetitions of history were never more apparent
than in the Gügler War. Habit has an especially tenacious grip
when, as in the Middle Ages, the pace of change is slow.
The exit through Alsace in January was dogged by hunger and
cold. Men dropped by the way or deserted, starving horses were left
to die, harness and armor abandoned. The strong continued to
pillage. Cities closed their gates against the ravagers and in one
case, with the aid of the Virgin Mary, added the humiliation of
another defeat. The citizens of Altkirch, resolved to do battle against
a Gügler company which was preparing an assault, were waiting on
the walls for the signal to begin combat when the night sky was
suddenly illuminated by colored lights like an aurora borealis.
Convinced that their patron, the Holy Virgin, was manifesting her
aid, the emboldened citizens charged to the oensive. With equal
but opposite eect on the enemy, the heavenly intervention spread
consternation and put the Güglers to ight.
Further on, at Wattwiller, within a day’s ride of Leopold’s castle at
Breisach, a treaty was signed on January 13 between Coucy and the

Dukes of Austria by which they ceded to him the ef of the
deceased Count of Nidau, including the town of Büren, in return for
his renouncing his other claims. Whether Coucy on his way out still
represented a sucient threat to extract this settlement, or whether
it had been negotiated earlier as the price of his departure, is
unrecorded. In any event, he did not go home empty-handed.* The
companies straggled back through January and February. Coucy had
succeeded in keeping them out of France for almost six months,
longer than Du Guesclin had removed them to Spain in 1365.
King Charles in February promptly commissioned him, together
with Marshal Sancerre and Olivier de Clisson and several knights
who had served with the Güglers, to command operations against
their former associates who had resumed pillage in Champagne. The
Sire du Coucy, “knight banneret with two knights bachelor and
seven squires of his house,” and Marshal Sancerre were each to have
200 men-at-arms, and Clisson 100, in the pay of the King, to lead
“against several companies just returned from the borders of
Germany.” Evidently they applied successful pressure. By March the
Breton companies reappeared along the Rhône and in May were
hired by the Pope for renewed war in Italy.
The Anglo-French peace conference in Bruges, reconvened in
December 1375 in the presence of dukes, cardinals, Constable Du
Guesclin, and other grand personages, spent itself in more legalities,
more displays, jousts, fetes, and banquets, and attracted even more
people than the previous parley, until an epidemic of some kind
subdued its pleasures. The dispute over territories and sovereignty
became further complicated by Charles’s demand that Edward pay
reparations for damages caused by the war. No agreement was
reached except to extend the truce for another year. Again Charles,
now anxious for a “good peace,” bethought him of the Sire de
Coucy, whose connections in England “well tted him to treat of
peace between the two Kings.”
At the time of Coucy’s expedition against Austria, the restless
Isabella had gone home as usual to England, leaving France several

months before her husband’s departure. Judging by various gifts,
grants, and subsidies showered on her by King Edward, she still
exercised a spell upon her father. Now in his dotage, Edward was
equally subject to the spell of a beautiful and vulgar mistress, Alice
Perrers, to whom he gave the late Queen’s robes and jewels and who
paraded through London on her way to a tournament in a triumphal
chariot under the title of “Lady of the Sun.” Isabella on her previous
visit had not shared residence at court with the supplanter of her
mother, but on this occasion her scruples were vanquished by lial
aection, or possibly expectation of largesse. The King paid her
debts and expenses and servants’ wages and granted pardons to
three separate criminals for whom she interceded, including one for
“breach of the peace” in killing the servant of another man. The
record does not tell why she was interested. She was presented “by
the King’s own hand” with a hooded robe of scarlet cloth cut in the
style of the robes of the Garter “with hood and sleeves furred and
turned up with ermine”; a second of the same for St. George’s Day;
and at Christmas an ermine-trimmed velvet robe each for herself
and her daughter Philippa. (Marie, as heiress to the Coucy domain,
remained in France.)
As King Edward’s granddaughter, eight-year-old Philippa was a
distinct personage who had been betrothed since the age of four to
Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford, then aged ten. In consequence
of this alliance she bore the title of Countess of Oxford and shared
with her mother in the bounty of the autumnal monarch. As the
year turned, Edward gave Isabella a complete set of chapel
furnishings and two saddles, one of red velvet embroidered with
gold violets and one ornamented with suns of gold and copper. She
hunted at Windsor, joined in archery with twelve ladies, each
presented by the King with an ornamental bow, and doubtless with
some reluctance returned to France in January 1376 when Coucy
came back from the Aargau. By April she was quite ready to go
home again. In that month Coucy asked the King of France for
permission to visit England with his wife.
Since his return from the Aargau, Coucy’s friends had been urging
him to become wholly French. They argued, according to Froissart,

that he need not necessarily lose his English lands if it came to a
choice, because the King of England could not expect him to give up
his far greater French domain, especially since he was French “by
name, blood, arms and extraction.” Since he knew himself esteemed
by the French King and felt grateful to him for nancing the
Austrian expedition, and doubtless too because he had no wish, in
case of renewed war, to be left again in an enforced and dicult
neutrality, Coucy was drawing close to a decision. But rst he
clearly hoped to resolve the matter of his English lands and
revenues on the forthcoming visit. His English wife, in view of her
unfading attachment to home, would surely have energetically
opposed a renunciation of her country. Nevertheless, that choice
was clearly in her husband’s mind upon accepting his new
assignment.
“And seeing that he was regarded as one of the wisest and most
prudent of nobles … in whom one could not want more of all good
and all loyalty, it was said to him, ‘Sire de Coucy, it is the intention
of the King and his Council that you belong with us in France and
that you can aid and counsel us in treating with the English.
Therefore we ask you that you make this voyage covertly and
wisely, as you know how to do, and that you discover from the King
of England and his Council on what terms peace can be made
between them and us.’ And so he hastened upon the voyage.”

The Historical Museum of Berne describes the banner as a 15th century
reproduction of the original. Bernard Aucien suggests that it may have been
captured in 1388 when the Swiss regained Nidau which had been ceded to
Coucy at the close of the Aargau campaign.

According to Swiss sources, the cession was not made until ten years later
when Leopold wanted Coucy’s support against the Swiss in the struggle that
led to Sempach.

Chapter 14

C
England’s Turmoil
oucy arrived in England in April 1376 just at the moment
when English discontent came to a head in the rst
impeachment by Parliament of ministers of the crown. In the
historic session called the Good Parliament the monarchy
discovered that it had drained the cup of public condence in a
government that could neither win the war nor end it.
The failure to conclude peace at Bruges had brought to a climax
public resentment of corrupt royal ocials, a protless war, military
mismanagement, and waste or embezzlement of the people’s tax
money. These were the same ills that twenty years earlier had
generated the French Third Estate’s challenge to the monarchy.
They found the same opportunity to make themselves felt when the
English crown needed a new subsidy to prepare for the prospective
end of the truce a year hence. Parliament was summoned for April,
and as members gathered, London reverberated with “a great
murmur of the people.”
The Sire and Dame de Coucy, who had been welcomed “joyously”
at court on their arrival, found themselves in the midst of wrath and
crisis surrounding the royal family and focusing on Isabella’s
brother, John of Gaunt, otherwise known as the Duke of Lancaster.
In place of the sick Prince and senile King, he was the key gure in
the royal government who was now held to blame for all that had
gone wrong.
Seventy-four knights of the shire and sixty town burgesses made
up the Commons of the Good Parliament. Acting with some support
from the Lords, they demanded redress of 146 grievances before
they would consent to a new subsidy. Their primary demand was
the dismissal of venal ministers together with the King’s mistress,
who was generally credited with being both venal and a witch. In

addition they wanted annual Parliaments, election rather than
appointment of members, and a long list of restraints upon arbitrary
practices and bad government. Two of their strongest discontents
were directed not against the government, but against abuses of a
foreign Church hierarchy and the demands of a laboring class grown
disobedient and disorderly. These issues, too, were great with
signicance: one was to lead to the ultimate break with Rome and
the other, much sooner, to the Peasants’ Revolt.
The strenuous and jubilant England Coucy had known in the
aftermath of Poitiers had grown sadly disgruntled. Pride of conquest
and wealth of ransoms had thinned like smoke, buoyant energy and
condence were sunk in quarrels and frivolity, the widened empire
had shriveled, English eets were swept ignominiously from the
Channel, bellicose Scots on the border—whom Edward had been
ghting even longer than he had the French—were as unsubdued as
ever. England’s heroes—Henry of Lancaster, Chandos, the Prince of
Wales—were dead or dying; the good Queen was replaced by a
strumpet who was believed to have established her dominion over
the King by restoring his sexual potency through the enchantments
of a friar skilled in the black arts. The once exuberant Edward who
had looked down on victory from the windmill at Crécy was now a
foolish infatuated old man “not stronger in mind than a boy of
eight.” The high tide of success had turned to loss, with every loss
paid for by disrupted trade and renewed taxes. A fty-year reign of
incessant warring was coming to a close in a rising sense of wasted
eort and misrule.
England by now had caught the contagion of lawlessness which
the war had spread upon the continent. Soldiers, returning with the
habit but no longer the fruits of pillage, formed small bands to live
by robbery, or as retainers of lords and knights who returned to nd
their demesnes impoverished as a result of the Black Death. A whole
generation, from the sack of Caen at Edward’s rst landing to the
raid in the Aargau, had accustomed itself to brigandage and resorted
to it easily at home. According to a complaint in Parliament,
companies of men and archers, sometimes under a knight, “do ride
in great routs in divers parts of England,” and take possession of

manors and lands, ravish women and damsels and bring them into
strange counties, “beat and maim and slay the people for to have
their wives and their goods,” hold them prisoner for ransom, and
“sometimes come before the justices in their sessions in such guise
with great force whereby the justices be afraid and not hardy to do
the law.” They commit riots and “horrible oenses” whereby the
realm is in great trouble, “to the great mischief and grievance of the
people.” Royal justice made no serious eort to restrain them
because the King was dependent for military forces on the same
nobles who were responsible for the disorders.
The resulting breakdown of justice was a major cause of the
Commons’ anger. In the Vision of Piers Plowman, which rst
appeared in 1377, the gure of Peace petitioning against Wrong, in
the person of a King’s ocer who has carried o his horses and
grain and left a tally on the King’s Exchequer in payment, complains
that he cannot bring him to law because “he maintaineth his men to
murder mine own.” Private lawlessness equally was on the rise.
“Tell me,” asked the Bishop of Rochester, a sympathizer of the
Commons, “why, in England, so many robberies remain unpunished
when in other countries murderers and thieves are commonly
hanged? In England the land is inundated by homicides and the feet
of men are swift to the shedding of blood.”
Outlawry among free peasants had increased because their
command of higher wages, as a result of depopulation, brought
them in constant conict with the law. The Statute of Laborers, in a
world that believed in xed conditions, still held grimly to pre-
plague wage levels, blind to the realities of supply and demand.
Because the provisions against leaving one employment for a better
were impossible to enforce, penalties were constantly augmented.
Violators who could not be caught were declared outlaws—and
made lawless by the verdict. Free peasants took to the nomadic life,
leaving a xed abode so that the statute could not be executed
against them, roaming from place to place, seeking day work for
good wages where they could get it, resorting to thievery or beggary
where they could not, breaking the social bond, living in the classic
enmity to authority of Robin Hood for the Sheri of Nottingham.

It was now that Robin Hood’s legend took on its great popularity
with the people, if not with the country gentlemen and solid
merchants of the Commons. They complained bitterly how “out of
great malice” laborers and servants leave at will, and how “if their
masters reprove them for bad service or oer to pay them according
to the said statutes, they y and run suddenly away out of their
service and out of their country … and live wicked lives and rob the
poor in simple villages in bodies of two and three together.”
To keep them on the land, the lords oered many concessions,
and towns welcomed the wanderers to ll the shortage of artisans,
so that they grew aggressive and independent. They were most
angry and seditious, and haughty about food, according to
Langland, when their fortunes prospered. “They deign not to dine
on day-old vegetables … penny ale will not do, nor a piece of
bacon,” but rather fresh-cooked meat and fried sh, “hot-and-hot for
the chill of their maw.” Joining with villeins and artisans, they
learned the tactics of association and strikes, combined against
employers, subscribed money for “mutual defense,” and “gather
together in great routs and agree by such Confederacy that everyone
shall aid the other to resist their Lords with a strong hand.” A
generation ready to revolt against oppression was taking shape.
Return of the Black Death in 1374–75 in the same epidemic that
had hastened Coucy’s departure from Lombardy thinned more
hearths and reduced the tax yield. The recurring outbreaks were
beginning to have a cumulative eect on population decline as they
did on the deepening gloom of the century. In the poll tax of 1379
four villages of Gloucestershire were recorded as making no returns;
in Norfolk six centuries later, ve small churches within a day’s visit
of each other still stood in deserted silence on the sites of villages
abandoned in the 14th century. As before, however, mortality was
erratic and there was no lack of land-hungry younger sons, poor
relations, and landless tenants ready to take over ownerless property
and keep land in cultivation.

Religious unrest was also disturbing the public mind and found its
voice in an Oxford theologian and preacher, John Wyclif. Seen
through the telescope of history, he was the most signicant
Englishman of his time. The materialism of the Church and the
worldliness of its representatives were old complaints common to all
Europe, but they were sharpened in England by antagonism to a
foreign papacy. As elsewhere in Europe, there was a deep craving to
detemporalize the Church and clear the way to God of all the money
and fees and donations and oblations that cluttered it. In Wyclif the
political and spiritual strains of English protestantism met and were
fused into a philosophy and a program.
Master of Balliol when he was 36, he stimulated anti-clericalism
and gained attention by his stirring sermons. On the issue of secular
versus spiritual authority, he carried further the dangerous thoughts
of Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham and found himself
champion of the English struggle against the supremacy of papal
law over the King’s courts and against the payment of revenues to
the papacy. As King’s chaplain in the 1360s he formulated ideas
very attractive to the government on the relationship of church and
state. In 1374 he served as the King’s envoy in the eort to reach a
settlement with the Pope.
In the year of Coucy’s visit Wyclif metaphorically nailed his thesis
to the door in the form of a treatise, De Civili Dominio (On Civil
Authority), which proposed nothing less than the disendowment of
the temporal property of the Church and the exclusion of the clergy
from temporal government. All authority, he argued, derived from
God, and in earthly matters belonged to the civil powers alone. By
logical progression and in harsh polemic lled with references to the
“stinking orders” of the friars and “horned ends” of the hierarchy,
his theories were soon to lead him to the radical proposition that
the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator
between man and God.
Wyclif’s peculiar achievement was to express both national
interest and popular feeling. For decades Parliament had
complained bitterly of the income withdrawn from England by

foreign holders of rich beneces like the haughty Cardinal
Talleyrand de Périgord. The amount was said to be twice the
revenues of the crown, and Church property in England was
estimated at a third of the land of the realm. The selling of papal
letters of authority by impostors was a wide abuse extended by a
regular business in forged papal seals. Immunity of the clergy from
civil justice, leaving a lay complainant without redress, was another
cause of resentment. Most of all, people minded the untness of
priests. When a priest could purchase from diocesan authority a
license to keep a concubine, how should he have better access to
God than the ordinary sinner? Priestly susceptibility was such that
when a man confessed adultery, the confessor was not allowed to
ask the name of the partner lest he be inclined to take personal
advantage of her frailty.
The venality if not lechery of the parish priest was usually a result
of his being underpaid, which led to the necessity of selling his
services; even the Eucharist might be withheld unless the
communicant produced an oering, which made a mockery of the
ritual. Judas, it was said, sold the body of Christ for thirty pieces of
silver; now priests did it daily for a penny. Frivolity was another
complaint: vicars were scolded by their bishops for throwing candle
drippings from the upper choir stalls on the heads of those below, or
conducting “detestable” parodies of the Divine service “for the
purpose of exciting laughter and perhaps of generating discord.”
Worldly clerics were censured in 1367 for wearing short tight
doublets with long fur- or silk-lined sleeves, costly rings and girdles,
embroidered purses, knives resembling swords, colored boots, and
even that mark of the Devil, slashed and curling pointed shoes.
Great prelates of noble family were as lordly as their lay peers,
dressing their retinues in uniform and traveling with squires, clerks,
falconers, grooms, messengers, pages, kitchen servants, carters, and
porters. Charity was gone from them, wrote Langland; bishops of
the Holy Church once apportioned Christ’s patrimony among the
poor and needy “but now Avarice keeps the key”; Charity was once
found “in a friar’s frock, but that was afar back in St. Francis’s
lifetime.” His fellow poet John Gower, speaking “for all Christian

folk,” denounced absentee priests, and bishops who added to their
great incomes by taking bribes from rich adulterers, and arrogant
cardinals in their red hats “like a crimson rose opening to the sun;
but that red is the color of guilty pride.”
When, from denouncing such priests, Wyclif reached the point of
denying the validity of the priesthood itself as necessary to
salvation, he was to strike at the foundation of the Church and its
interpretation of Christ’s role. From that point he moved ineluctably
to the heresy of denying transubstantiation, for without miraculous
power the priest could not transform the bread and wine into the
true body and blood of Christ. From there the rest followed—the
non-necessity of the Pope, rejection of excommunication,
confession, pilgrimages, worship of relics and saints, indulgences,
treasury of merit. All were to be swept away under Wyclif’s broom.
In replacement he oered the Bible in English, translated by his
disciples, that it might bring religion to the people in a form they
could understand without need of the priest and his meaningless
Latin doggerel. No other act of a religious reformer would cut more
sharply into the thousand-year establishment of the Christian
Church, but this was still some years ahead. In the seventies the
movement of dissent called Lollardy, from a word applied to
Flemish mystics meaning “mumbler,” was preparing the way. While
Lollardy was greatest among the common people and lower clergy,
it spread, too, among knights and some great nobles who resented
the clergy’s hold on political power. The Earl of Salisbury removed
all statues of saints from his chapel, earning the title of “derider of
images, scoer at sacraments,” and there were others called “hatted
knights” who refused to uncover when the host was carried through
the streets.
Wyclif’s ideas and the crown’s needs tted together like sword
and sheath, accounting for the strange alliance that made him a
protégé of John of Gaunt. His theory of disendowment, which
maintained that nobles could repossess the lands their ancestors had
bequeathed to the Church, put a doctrinal oor under Gaunt’s desire
to plunder the rich ecclesiastical establishment. What Henry VIII
succeeded in doing a century and a half later, John of Gaunt already

had in mind in 1376. Meanwhile the losses of territory in France, for
which the clerical Chancellor, William of Wykeham, Bishop of
Winchester, and his fellow ecclesiastics in oce were held
responsible, served to oust them from government. The Lords in
Parliament resolved in 1371 that none but laymen “who could
answer for their misdeeds in the King’s courts” could henceforth
hold the oces of Chancellor, Treasurer, Barons of the Exchequer,
and Clerks of the Privy Council.
The adverse tide in France was not stemmed by the change.
Merchants and landed gentry were not happy to see the money
squeezed from them in taxes dissipated in the horribles expenses et
incredibiles of the Duke of Lancaster and his suite at Bruges. The
envoys spent their time—according to the censorious monk of St.
Albans, Thomas Walsingham, who hated Lancaster because of his
anti-clerical policy—in “rioting … revelling and dancing” at a cost
of £20,000. If Walsingham’s Chronicon Angliae is suspect for its
animus, it is also invaluable for vivid information about a hectic
time.
The people’s loyalty was severely tried, too, by purveyance—that
is, the King’s right when traveling to commandeer supplies for a
number of miles on either side of the road, and also for the
provisioning of the army. Purveyors “seize on men and horses in the
midst of their eld work … on the very bullocks at the plough” so
that “men make dole and murmur” at the King’s approach. What
had been a nuisance was raised in wartime to economic tyranny.
Nobles in charge of military organization proteered on war
contracts, as did royal purveyors and the clerks who made payments
from Exchequer funds. Coastal towns suered from the billeting of
troops while they awaited transportation overseas. Trade declined
owing to the disruption of shipping, ransoms no longer owed in a
golden stream to nourish the economy, and such ransoms as did
come in were kept by the crown to pay English troops and release
English prisoners. Installments on King Jean’s ransom had reached
only three fths of the total when King Charles stopped payment on
the renewal of war and, indeed, demanded return of the money as

reparations. By now England was growing poorer, not richer, from
the war.
When Parliament met in 1376, the Commons, which existed only
as an ad hoc body for purposes of consenting to taxes, gathered
itself for political action. First it sought strength by association with
the Lords, who represented the permanent Parliament and contained
a strong anti-Lancaster faction prepared to challenge the Duke. A
council of twelve, consisting of four bishops, four earls, and four
barons, was drawn from the Lords to act in concert with the
Commons. The lay leader of the group was Coucy’s former ward, the
young Earl of March, who was married to Philippa, daughter of
Lancaster’s elder brother, the late Duke of Clarence. She stood in
line to the crown after the dying Black Prince and his nine-year-old
son, Richard. Consequently her husband believed he had reason to
fear the Duke of Lancaster, who was popularly credited with a
wicked uncle’s designs on the crown.
Lancaster indeed had his sights xed on a crown, but it was the
crown of Castile by right of his marriage to a daughter of the
defunct Pedro the Cruel. He already styled himself King of Castile—
or Monsieur d’Espagne—and probably had no serious intention of
usurping his nephew’s rights; what he wanted was to end the war
with France so that he could mobilize England’s forces to gain the
Spanish throne. As President of the Royal Council, he was the real
head of the government; he controlled his father, the King, by
alliance with Alice Perrers and gained a reputation as a libertine by
openly maintaining a mistress of his own, Katherine Swynford,
widow of a knight killed in Aquitaine, whom he later respectably
married and by whom he fathered the Tudor line. He lived in the
splendid Savoy Palace on the bank of the Thames and enjoyed its
terraces, rose gardens, magnicent collection of jewels, and the rest
of the inheritance of his rst wife’s father, the rst Duke of
Lancaster; in short, he possessed all the attributes of power and
riches necessary for unpopularity and was widely considered to be a

villain. The reputation, like his older brother’s as a paragon of
chivalry, was probably overdrawn.
Popular excitement as Parliament convened was heightened by
the arrival of the Prince of Wales, who had himself carried to
Westminster from his country estate to be present during the
session. His purpose, in the shadow of death, was to obtain
assurance from Lords and Commons of fealty to his son, but the
public believed he had come to support the Commons against his
brother, the Duke, whose ambitions he was believed to fear. In fact
the Prince’s arrogant temperament was not one likely to welcome
interference with the monarchy, but what counts is not so much the
fact as what the public perceives to be the fact. Because the
challengers in Parliament believed the Prince to be their supporter,
they drew assurance and strength from his presence.
The tumultuous assembly was held at Westminster, with the
Commons meeting in the chapter house of the abbey and the Lords
in the White Chamber of the palace nearby. As Earl of Bedford,
Coucy could have taken his place among the Lords at the opening
ceremony on April 28, but there is no evidence that he did.
Taking the oensive, the Commons for the rst time in its history
elected a Speaker in the person of a knight of Herefordshire, Sir
Peter de la Mare, who not accidentally was seneschal of the Earl of
March. Critical moments often produce men to match the need; Sir
Peter proved to be a man of courage, perseverance, and, in
Walsingham’s partisan judgment, a “spirit lifted up by God.” On
behalf of the whole House he brought charges of malfeasance
against two of the King’s ministers, Lord Latimer, the Chamberlain,
and Sir Richard Lyons, a rich merchant and member of the Royal
Council who acted as the King’s chief agent with the commercial
community, and also against Alice Perrers, who, it was said, “has
yearly up to 3,000 pounds from the King’s coers. The realm would
greatly prot by her removal.”
Latimer was a great noble and Knight of the Garter, a veteran of
Crécy, Auray, and of Lancaster’s long march, a former Constable of
Dover and Warden of the Cinque Ports. He and Lyons were accused
by the Speaker of amassing immense fortunes by schemes and

frauds to cheat the revenue, including the acceptance of 20,000
pounds from the King in repayment for a loan of 20,000 marks, the
mark being worth two thirds of the pound.
One by one, members of the Commons, speaking in turn at a
lectern in the center of the chamber, added their charges and
complaints. The King’s councillors, they said, had grown rich at the
cost of impoverishing the nation; they had deceived the King and
wasted his revenues, causing the repeated demands for fresh
subsidies. The people were too poor and feeble to endure further
taxation. Let Parliament discuss instead how the King might
maintain the war out of his own resources.
Infuriated by the presumption of what he called “these low hedge-
knights,” Lancaster threatened in private “to give them such a fright
that they shall not provoke me again.” He was warned by an adviser
that the Commons “have the countenance of the Prince your
brother” and the support of the Londoners, who would not allow
them to be touched. Biding his time, the Duke visited the Commons
next day under a guise so gracious that members stared at him in
amazement, but they were not diverted from pursuing the charges
against Latimer and Lyons. They summoned as witnesses two former
Treasurers and other ocials, demanded to examine the public
accounts, and conducted the proceedings as a formal trial. When all
the evidence had been heard, the Commons cried with one voice,
“Lord Duke, now you can see and hear that Lord Latimer and
Richard Lyons have acted falsely for their own advantage for which
we demand remedy and redress!”
When Latimer demanded to know by whom and by what
authority he was being indicted, Sir Peter de la Mare supplied the
historic answer that the Commons as a body would maintain all
their charges in common. At one stroke he created the constitutional
means for impeachment and removal of ministers. Lyons thought to
spike the process by sending the Black Prince a bribe of £1,000
concealed in a barrel of sturgeon. The Prince sent it back, but the
King, in more comfortable cynicism, accepted a similar bribe with
the jest that he was only taking back his own.

Parliament found the charges proved. The two accused ministers
and four subordinates, including Latimer’s son-in-law, Lord Nevill,
steward of the King’s household, were judged guilty, dismissed from
oce and condemned to nes and imprisonment, although Latimer
was shortly released on bail provided by a group of his friends. Even
Alice Perrers was removed on charges of meddling in the law by
sitting alongside judges on the bench and overawing them into
decisions in favor of her friends. Miserably the King had to
acquiesce in her banishment from court.
The petitions of reform were accepted in the King’s name by John
of Gaunt, who for the time being considered that he had insucient
support in the Lords to do otherwise. Besides annual Parliaments,
the Commons demanded election of members by the “better folk” of
the shires rather than by appointment of the sheri. The petition for
enforcement of the Statute of Laborers, with provisions for arrest
and punishment of violators, reected the growing antagonism
between employer and worker. Likewise the growing antagonism to
the papacy appeared in the petition for the exclusion of papal tax-
collectors and prohibition of the export of money. No petition was
made for peace, probably because the Commons believed the recent
ill-fortunes in war had been due to the incompetent and corrupt
leadership they were now replacing.
To contain John of Gaunt—or “bell the cat,” as it appeared in
Langland’s fable—and to maintain the reforms once Parliament had
dispersed, a new Council was named of nine lords and prelates
including the ex-Chancellor, William of Wykeham, and the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, a rather pedestrian
character of non-noble birth. The youth of the Council was
characteristic of the early age at which men exercised power. Apart
from Wykeham and Sudbury, six of the seven other members,
including William Courtenay, Bishop of London, were under the age
of 34, two of these under 30, and one, the Earl of March, was 25.
Their opponent, the great Duke of Lancaster, was 36, born in the
same year as Coucy.
Just as Parliament reached the peak of its accomplishment, the
Prince fell into a fatal phase of his disease, complicated by

dysentery. He grew so weak that he several times fainted and was
thought to be dead. His chambers lled with doctors and surgeons,
with the weeping and groaning of his followers and visits of the
royal family for the nal leave-taking. His sister Isabella and the
Sire de Coucy came to the bedside to add their tears. John of Gaunt
came, and the two younger brothers, Edmund of Langley, future
Duke of York, something of a nonentity, and Thomas of Woodstock,
unpleasant, violent, and ill-fated. In a parent’s sad survival, the King
came amid “great lamentation” and “no one there could keep from
tears in great desolation at the circumstances and the sorrow of the
King taking leave of his son forever,” the fth of his adult children
to go before him.*
The doors of the Prince’s room were opened so that old comrades
and all who had served him could attend the passing, and “each one
sobbed heartily and wept very tenderly,” and he said to all, “I
commend you to my son, who is very young and little, and pray
you, as you have served me, to serve him loyally.” He asked the
King and Lancaster to swear an oath of support, which they gave
without reserve, and all the earls, barons, and bachelors swore it
too, and “of lamentation and sighing, of crying aloud and sorrowing,
there was a great noise.”
On the day before the end, the Prince’s last will was completed,
adding to the detailed arrangements already made. Though death
was but the ight of the soul from its bodily prison, it was
customarily accompanied by the most precise care for bequests,
funeral, tombstone, and every other aspect of earthly remains, as if
anxiety of what was to come sharpened reluctance to leave the
world. The Prince’s instructions were unusually detailed: his bed
furnishings, including hangings embroidered with the deeds of
Saladin, were left to his son, his war-horses were specically
disposed, his funeral procession was designed to the last trumpet,
his tomb egy ordered, with curious ambivalence, to show him
“fully armed in the pride of battle … our face meek and our leopard
helm placed beneath the head.”
Attendant bishops urged the dying man to ask forgiveness of God
and of all those he had injured. In a last are of arrogance he

refused, then, as the end approached, joined his hands and prayed
pardon of God and man. But he could not sustain meekness. When
Sir Richard Stury, a Lollard knight who had been among those
dismissed from the King’s household by the Good Parliament, and
who at some point had evidently fallen foul of the Prince, came to
“make his peace,” the Prince said bitterly, “Come, Richard, come
and look on what you have long desired to see.” When Stury
protested his good will, the Prince replied, “God pay you according
to your deserts. Leave me and let me see your face no more.”
Begged by his confessors not to die without forgiving, he remained
silent and only under pressure muttered at last, “I will do it.” A few
hours later, on June 8, 1376, he died aged 46.
As Earl of Bedford and member of the family, Coucy rode in the
mile-long funeral procession with King Edward and the Prince’s
brothers behind the hearse drawn by twelve horses. On the
monument at Canterbury, where the Prince desired to be buried,
were inscribed verses in French on the traditional theme of the
evanescence of earthly power: how in life the deceased had great
nobility, lands, houses, treasure, silver and gold, but now of all
bereft, with beauty gone and esh wasted, he lies alone, reminding
the passerby,
Such as thou art, so once was I,
As I am now, so shalt thou be.
Encased in armor, the egy speaks dierently: in what little can be
seen of the face under a drooping mustache and close-covering
helmet, there is no glimpse of Christian humility.
Left between a doddering King and a child heir, with only the
hated regent Lancaster at the helm, the nation indulged in grief
exaggerated by fear. At a time when defeats at sea had revived fears
of French invasion, the English felt bereft of their protector, “for
while he lived,” wrote Walsingham, “they feared no inroad of any
enemy, even as when he was present they feared no warlike
encounter.” Had the Prince lived and kept his health, he could have
averted the troubles that were to arise under a child king, but not

the social unrest nor the ebbing of victory. Although Walsingham
reproached “thou untimely too-eager Death,” death may not have
been untimely, for, unlike his father, the Prince died while he still
reected the image of a hero. Froissart called him “the Flower of
Chivalry of all the world” and the chronicler of the Quatre Premiers
Valois acknowledged him “one of the greatest knights on earth,
having renown above all men.” Charles V held a requiem mass for
his late enemy in the Sainte Chapelle, attended by himself and the
ranks of French nobility.
What was it in the Black Prince that everyone admired? Comrades
in chivalry felt pride in him because he represented their image of
themselves; the massacre of Limoges was nothing to them. The
people of England mourned him because his marvelous capture of a
king at Poitiers and his other conquests had dressed them in
greatness. Though his famous victory in Spain had proved
ephemeral, his empire in Aquitaine had collapsed, and his prowess
faded in disease, yet he represented that emotional choice a people
makes to satisfy its craving for a leader.
The death of the Prince was the turning point in favor of John of
Gaunt. While still in session, Parliament took the precaution of
having the boy Richard presented to them in person to be conrmed
as heir apparent. This being done, the memorable session closed on
July 10, having lasted 74 days, the longest of any Parliament up to
that time. Its spectacular accomplishment was wiped away the
moment it dispersed. With no permanent organization or
autonomous means of reassembly, the Commons ceased to exist as a
body as soon as members scattered to shire and town. Its reforms
had not been enacted as statutes and, like the reforms of the French
Grand Ordinance, were simply rendered null by the hand that
regained eective power. By favors or threats, Lancaster won over
or neutralized the leading lords of the opposition, except for the Earl
of March, who was compelled to resign as Marshal. His place was
taken by his onetime ally Sir Henry Percy, who went over to the
Duke.
The Lords’ absence of political principle was the key to the
collapse. Lancaster declared the entire parliamentary session

invalid, reinstated Lord Latimer and his associates, dismissed the
new Council and recalled the old, arrested and imprisoned without
trial Sir Peter de la Mare when he attempted a protest, banished
Bishop William of Wykeham from court and seized his temporal
properties. When, sealing his control, he brought back Alice Perrers
to reweave her spell over the King, the bishops who had acted with
the Commons “were like dumb dogs unable to bark.”
Except for impeachment, the work of the Good Parliament left
hardly a constitutional trace. Yet in expressing so forcefully, and for
its brief moment eectively, the will of the middle class, the role of
the Commons strongly impressed the nation and taught an
experience of political action that took root.
Witness to England’s turmoil, Coucy returned to France in the
summer or fall of 1376. Given the crisis during his visit, he is
unlikely to have obtained a clear statement of what peace terms
England was prepared to accept, but he would certainly have
brought back a report of a torn and vulnerable nation. He is
reported by Froissart to have advised Charles V not to wait for the
King of England to oer combat when the truce should end, but to
seek him out in his own territory because “the English are never so
weak or so easy to defeat as at home.”
Before Coucy left England, King Edward fell ill of a great malady
and “all his physicians despaired and did not know how to care for
him or what medicines to give him.” Although he recovered
spontaneously, the end of the reign was clearly approaching and
with it the moment for Coucy’s decision. Whether Isabella returned
with him to France or remained with her sinking father is uncertain.
Out of respect for his father-in-law, Coucy took no overt action at
this time, but immediately on his return he accepted a diplomatic
mission to the Count of Flanders in the interests of France against
England. By now Coucy was a member of the Royal Council, clearly
relied on by Charles V for his perspicacity and diplomacy. The
King’s anxieties had been increased by the mental illness of Queen
Jeanne who in 1373 was aicted “so that she lost her mind and her

memory.” After many prayers and pilgrimages by her husband who
was devoted to her, she recovered her health and senses and was
named, in the event of the King’s death, guardian of the Dauphin.
She was to be assisted by a Regency Council of fty composed of
prelates, ministers of crown and Parlement, and ten of the “most
notable and sucient” bourgeois of Paris. Twelve of the Council
were to be in constant service of the Queen. As a member of the
Council, Coucy received an annual wage of 1,000 francs in addition
to payments of 500 francs a month on his annual pension of 6,000
francs. At about this time his daughter Marie, heiress of his domain,
joined the household of the Queen who took charge of her
education along with that of the Dauphin and his brothers and
sisters. In April 1377 the records show a payment to Coucy of 2,000
francs, to be deducted from his pension, for furnishing his several
castles with crossbows against the event of renewed war.
Still trying to avert that last calamity, Charles again delegated
Coucy as diplomat to re-open negotiations with England, this time
without benet of the royal Dukes, to spare their expensive
presence. Over the next six months, from January to June 1377, the
parleys met variously at Boulogne, Calais, and halfway between at
Montreuil on the coast. As the only lay noble in a group of
ministers, Coucy had as his chief colleague Bureau de la Rivière, the
Chamberlain, along with two ecclesiastical ministers, the Bishops of
Laon and Bayeux, and various members of the Council.
The English envoys, representing adherents of both Lancaster and
the late Prince, were men with whom Coucy was very likely
acquainted, from his recent visit to England if not before. Varying
from one meeting to another, they included the guardian of the heir
to the throne, Sir Guichard d’Angle, a gallant and admired Gascon,
long a campaigner with the Black Prince; the Lollard knight Sir
Richard Stury, whom Lancaster had reinstated in oce; Lord
Thomas Percy, a veteran of the French wars and brother of Sir
Henry Percy; the Earl of Salisbury; and lastly a trusted servant of the
court connected with Lancaster’s entourage, Georey Chaucer.
Recently appointed to the well-paid and important post of
Comptroller of the Wool Customs for the port of London, Chaucer

was a successful civil servant whose other life as a poet had
bloomed in an astonishing break with precedent: in 1369 he had
written a long poem of courtly love, The Book of the Duchess, not in
French appropriate to its subject and audience, but in unliterary and
still unstable English. Though he was well acquainted with French,
from which he had translated the Roman de la Rose, something in
the ambience of his time prompted Chaucer to work in the same
language as his gaunt and penniless contemporary, the street cleric
Langland, who called himself “Long Will.”
In dierent circumstances from Langland, Chaucer enjoyed a
grant from the King of a daily pitcher of wine and was married to
Katherine Swynford’s sister Philippa, a relationship that had brought
them both into the ducal household. The Book of the Duchess was a
graceful elegy for Gaunt’s rst wife, Blanche, a well-beloved lady
who had died at the age of 27 after bearing seven children. Though
its choice of language was considered peculiar, its author lost no
favor for that. In 1373 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Italy
to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Doge of Genoa and to
conduct “secret business” in Florence. It was the year of Boccaccio’s
lectures in Florence on Dante. Chaucer returned steeped in new
material, but his epic of Troilus and Criseyde, adapted from
Boccaccio, had to wait while he was dispatched to treat of peace
with France.
Poets and writers served frequently as ambassadors because their
rhetorical powers conferred distinction on the elaborate speeches
required on these occasions. Petrarch had served the Visconti as
envoy or at least as ornamental gurehead of a mission. Boccaccio
negotiated for Florence with the Pope, and the poet Deschamps
acted for Charles V and his successor. Diplomacy was a ceremonial
and verbose procedure with great attention paid to juridical detail
and points of honor, which may have been one reason why it so
often failed to produce agreement.
The prolonged parleys of 1377 acquainted Coucy with every pivot
in the complex relationship of England and France. Oers and
counteroers and intricate bargains were discussed concerning
Scotland, Castile, Calais, a proposed new dynasty for Aquitaine

under a son of Edward III who would renounce his ties to England,
or failing that, a partition, or an exchange of efs as complicated as
a game of jack-straws. As always since the war began, nuncios of the
Pope added their intensive eorts at mediation. Although the French
held the upper hand, the English out of weakness and indecision
could not be brought to accept any settlement, even a proposed
match between Prince Richard and King Charles’s seven-year-old
daughter Marie.
The rst parley broke up without progress and reconvened a
month later. Twice the truce, due to expire April 1, was prolonged
for a month to keep the negotiations alive. The envoys treated
earnestly in long working sessions. What was Coucy’s role, what
Chaucer’s? Their words have vanished; no record was kept because
the discussions, especially regarding the marriage, were secret.
Charles’s instructions to his envoys stated that “The King does not
wish the marriage to be broached on his part, but if the English
mention it, you may listen to what they say and afterwards report to
the King.”
The French oered many proposals, including title to twelve cities
of Aquitaine (which England already held), if Edward would give
back Calais and all that he had taken in Picardy; either that, they
said, “or else nothing.” Stubbornly the English refused, believing
that as long as they held their foothold in northern France they
could yet return and regain their losses.
England’s domestic situation during the parleys erupted in a new
crisis. Lancaster had suppressed but far from settled English
discontents. A new Parliament, suciently packed by the Duke to
elect his steward as Speaker, obediently granted subsidies in
January. The bishops were not so amenable and Wyclif was their
target. He had not yet voiced his denial of the Eucharist and the
priesthood, but his statement of civil dominion and disendowment
was heresy enough. Although his call for reform of clerical abuses
and his anti-papism had support among the clergy, they were not
going to wait passively to be disendowed. Archbishop Sudbury and
Bishop Courtenay of London summoned Wyclif to a convocation in
February to answer for his heretical preaching. The recurring

struggle of centuries between crown and Church, was now played
out again in an uproarious fracas at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Lancaster hoped to discredit the bishops with the laity. He
assigned four Masters of Theology to Wyclif’s defense and proceeded
himself in company with the Marshal, Sir Henry Percy, and their
armed retinues to attend the hearings at St. Paul’s. A crowd of
aroused citizens lled the cathedral, angered by rumors that
Lancaster was planning to extend the Marshal’s jurisdiction over the
city’s traditional right to maintain public order. Bishop Courtenay
was popular with the Londoners, the Duke was not. Anger rose
when the armed guard shoved people aside to make way for the
Duke and Marshal, followed by a loud quarrel when Courtenay
refused the Duke’s demand for a chair for Wyclif. The young and
vigorous Bishop, himself the son of an earl and a descendant of
Edward I, was not about to take orders inside his own precincts.
“I will make you bend, you and all the rest of the bishops,”
growled Lancaster. The crowd moved and shouted in menace,
Lancaster threatened to arrest the disturbers, Courtenay told him if
he did so in the cathedral he would be excommunicated. “A little
more of this,” the Duke was heard to mutter, “and I will have you
dragged out of the church by the hair of your head.” The crowd’s
rage exploded, the Duke and Marshal judged it wise to withdraw,
Wyclif had not even spoken. Lancaster had succeeded in breaking
up the proceedings, which was his object, but at a cost of turning
popular sentiment ever more against himself, not against the
bishops.
London seethed, and on news that Percy had arrested a citizen for
slandering the Duke, boiled over. A mob gathered in a lynching
mood to rush the Savoy Palace, and on its way fell upon a priest
who spoke insultingly of Peter de la Mare and beat him to death, as
Marcel’s mob had murdered a hapless victim of its rage twenty years
before. Warned while dining on oysters at the Savoy, Lancaster and
Percy escaped by boat down the Thames to take refuge in the
honored halls of the Princess of Wales and her son, where none
would venture to assault them. Meanwhile Bishop Courtenay, also
warned and fearing a catastrophe for which he might be blamed,

had hastened to the Savoy Palace and succeeded in quieting the
mob.
After ight and humiliation, Lancaster required that his authority
be restored by a formal apology from the city. The Princess pleaded
with the citizens to be reconciled with the Duke for her sake; the
King’s sovereignty was invoked; the authorities of London exacted
the release of Peter de la Mare as the price of their apology; the
clergy regained the oces of Chancellor and Treasurer. Factions
were deepened and the state further torn by the aair.
In the excitement at St. Paul’s, the matter of Wyclif had not been
tested. The English prelates, caught between clerical interest and
national sentiment, might have been content to let the matter drop,
but the papacy was not. In May, Gregory XI issued ve Bulls
addressed to the English episcopacy and to the King and the
University of Oxford, condemning Wyclif’s errors and demanding his
arrest. All discussion of his heretical doctrines was to be suppressed
and all who supported them removed from oce. An issue full of
danger was added to all the other sources of strife. The new
Parliament was strongly anti-papal; the King, babbling of hawks and
hunting instead of attending to the urgent needs of his soul, was
dying. For the moment, while England waited uneasily for the
change of reign, the bishops held the proceedings against Wyclif in
abeyance.
In France the negotiators held a nal meeting in May at Montreuil
in the ancient walled castle whose western ramparts faced the sea.
The Chancellors of both countries took part, Pierre d’Orgement for
France and the Bishop of St. David’s for England. Terms were
discussed at length in open session, which Charles wanted so that
his nal oer should be formally submitted and receive a rm
answer. He did not get it. While generous in what it left in English
hands, his oer withheld sovereignty over any part of France and
insisted on Calais. Concealing rejection in evasion, the English said
they lacked nal authority and would have to submit the terms to
their King. As the event shortly proved, the French must at this

point have started preparing for belligerent action. While the talks
petered out, the little Princess Marie died in Paris, eliminating the
proposed marriage. The parley broke up with no place or date
agreed upon for another meeting and no prolongation of the truce.
By the time the English envoys reached home, King Edward too
had died, on June 23, the penultimate day of the truce. The jubilee
year of his reign had passed virtually unnoticed and his death
excited hardly more attention. He died deserted by the minions of
power, including Alice Perrers, who was said to have stripped the
rings from the King’s ngers as she departed. A ten-year-old child
mounted the throne, initiating the divisive time that was to spread
its wreckage over the next century and conrm Langland’s warning
from Holy Writ, “Woe is the land with a youth for its king!”
Isabella de Coucy, summoned from France in April by couriers on
“business of extreme urgency,” was at her father’s side when he
died. Shortly before the end, she dispatched couriers to Coucy with
news and “important questions” to be settled. On June 26, even
before her father’s funeral, she requested and received permission to
return to France, evidently with urgent matters to discuss.
The problem for Coucy was more than simply one of allegiance; it
was aggravated by great revenues, by bonds of kinship of great
importance in that day, and by the oath of fellowship in the Order
of the Garter. To repudiate fealty, kinship, and fellowship was no
light thing. Other lords, like the Captal de Buch and Clisson, had
transferred their loyalty from one side to another, but they were
generally Gascons or Bretons or Hainaulters who did not feel
themselves basically French or English. Coucy’s own seneschal, the
valiant Chanoine de Robersart, turned English while he was in
England with Coucy in the 1360s. After swearing homage to Edward
III, he coolly returned with Lancaster’s army to ravage Picardy,
which a few years earlier he had fought with such verve to defend.
He was, however, a native of Hainault.
Plainly, Coucy could play no great part in his country’s aairs if
he maintained neutrality as before. He not only needed to take
sides; he doubtless wanted to take sides. National feeling had

swelled in the years of French recovery. Writers gloried in the many
cities of Picardy, Normandy, and Aquitaine retaken by Charles V.
“Not Roland, not Arthur nor Oliver,” exclaims the knight in the
Songe du Vergier, a political allegory of 1376, “ever did such deeds of
arms as you have done by your wisdom, your power and your
prayers!” (and, the author might have added, by Charles’s
persuasive use of money). “When you came to the throne the horns
and pride of your enemies reached up to heaven. Thanks to God,
you have broken their horns and profoundly humiliated them.”
Out of the polarity of war, a sense of French nationhood
developed against the foil of England. In a dialogue between a
French and an English soldier written about 1370 by the future
Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, the Englishman declares that Normandy at
least should belong to England and that they are within their rights
in this matter. “Hold your peace!” cries the Frenchman. “That is not
true. You can hold nothing this side of the sea except by tyranny;
the sea is and ought to be your boundary.” That was a new idea.
Homage and dynastic marriages were still the form of loyalty, but
country was becoming the determinant. No longer could a French
noble like Harcourt have so guiltlessly joined and guided the English
in invasion of his native land. No longer could Coucy straddle
loyalty across the Channel.
Two months after King Edward’s death, Coucy addressed to
Richard II a formal renunciation of “all that I hold of you in faith
and homage.” Dated August 26, 1377, and presented to Richard by
several lords and squires sent by Coucy to witness the delivery, the
letter recalled the “alliance” he had had with “my most honored and
redoubted lord and father, the King lately deceased (on whom God
have mercy),” and continued:
Now it has happened that war has arisen between my natural and sovereign
lord, on the one part, and you on the other, at which I grieve more than at
anything that could happen in this world, and would it could be remedied,
but my lord has commanded and required me to serve him, and acquit myself
of my duty, as I am bound to do; whom as you know well I ought not to
disobey; so I will serve him to the best of my power as I ought to do.

Wherefore, most honorable and puissant lord, in order that no one may in
any wise speak or say a thing against me, or against my honor, I acquaint you
with the aforesaid things and return to you all that I may hold from you in
faith or homage.
And also, most honored sire, my most honored lord and father above
named was pleased to ordain and place me in the most noble company and
Order of the Garter; so let it please your most noble and puissant lordship to
provide in my place whomsoever you may please, and therein hold me
excused.
The double allegiance was broken. In becoming “a good and true
Frenchman,” Coucy had chosen a nationality, even if the word did
not yet exist. Only one thing was remarkable about the choice: that
he parted with his wife along with his English lands and fealty. It
has generally been said that he felt obliged to part with her in order
to be free to choose France, but this would have been necessary only
if Isabella had refused to be reconciled to the loss of their English
estates. On renunciation of allegiance, the properties would be
subject to conscation. Everything known about Isabella suggests
that this was the determining factor. Her compulsive extravagance,
her neurotic dependence on home and on her father’s indulgence—
which she may have hoped to transfer onto her brothers and
nephew—her insecurity in France make it likely that the separation
was her choice, whether or not it was also her husband’s.
What Coucy felt for his vain, spoiled, selsh, willful wife—love,
hate, or indierence—no evidence tells. Judging by what is known
of her temperament, she was not a lovable Plantagenet, of whom
history records few. In any event, she returned to and remained in
England with her younger daughter, Philippa, who had always lived
there. All her husband’s English estates, “manors, hamlets, honours,
domains, towns, lands, tenements, animals, provender, goods and
chattels” were forfeited to the crown and cautiously delivered to a
trusteeship for Isabella consisting of the Archbishop of York, two
bishops, and four other commissioners. Since women were not
precluded from owning property in their own right, the arrangement
indicates that her brothers mistrusted her habits. The terms

provided that the revenues would be paid to her by the trustees “as
long as she remains in England.”
Isabella’s indeterminate status as neither wife nor widow lasted
only two years. In April 1379 she died in unknown circumstances at
the age of 47. All of Coucy’s lands in England were eventually
settled on his daughter Philippa.
The French renewed belligerency the instant the truce expired. In
combination with the Spanish eet, they launched a series of raids
on England’s south coast even before they learned of King Edward’s
death. In an eort to keep that event secret from them during the
transfer of power, the English had “stopped incontinent all the
passages of the kingdom, letting no one issue from the realm.” The
organization required to close all exits must have been considerable,
but proved futile since the French had already started.
Under the command of Admiral Jean de Vienne, the French and
Spaniards landed at Rye opposite Boulogne on June 29 and
subjected it to 24 hours of savagery—burning, looting, killing men,
women, and children and carrying o girls to the ships in deliberate
emulation of the English savagery inicted on the towns of France.
In the ames, a church of “wonderful beauty” (according to
Walsingham) was destroyed. Despite the insistence of a group of
French knights who wanted to hold Rye as a permanent base—a
kind of Calais in England—the Admiral refused. Occupation was not
the French object but destruction and terror to bring the English to a
peace treaty, and to prevent reinforcements for Calais, where the
French were planning a major attack.
Meeting little eective resistance, the French continued down the
south coast, attacking Folkestone, Portsmouth, Weymouth,
Plymouth, Dartmouth, and marching ten miles inland to burn
Lewes, where they scattered and slaughtered a body of 200
defenders led by the local prior and two knights. After sailing away,
they returned a month later to devastate the Isle of Wight o
Southampton. The dread that haunted the English out of a dark

atavistic terror of ancient Danish raiders and conquering Normans
was brought to awful reality.
Weakness of defense was not due to any false sense of security.
These were the same towns attacked by the French in previous
raids. Moreover in the last six months, as the truce waned, royal
decrees had been raising the blackest specters of French invasion,
but in the disarray of the time few defense measures had been
taken. When the invader came, the fate of the towns did not greatly
excite the nobles’ protective eorts. Sir John Arundel, a knight of
later infamy, successfully defended Hampton with 400 lances, but
not until the citizens at his demand had put up the money in good
coin to engage them.
When Lancaster’s castle of Pevensey on the Sussex coast was
endangered, the Duke was reported by the ever-hostile Walsingham
to have refused to send defenders, with the callous remark, “Let the
French burn it. I am rich enough to rebuild it.” The remark sounds
invented and as such breathes the same malice toward the nobles as
animated another clerical chronicler, Jean de Venette—and for the
same reason: failure of the knights to defend the land and people
against their enemies. It was no accident that out of these invaded
counties, Kent and Sussex, the Peasants’ Revolt was to come.

The others were Lionel, dead in Italy, Joanna in the Black Death, and two
daughters, Margaret, married to the Earl of Pembroke, and Mary, married to
the Duke of Brittany.

It is not entirely clear whether the couriers were sent to her in France or by
her from England to her husband in France.

Robersart settled in England with three sons and founded a line that
terminated some 200 years later in Amy Robsart, the ill-fated wife of Queen
Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.

Chapter 15

T
The Emperor in Paris
he most spectacular if not the most signicant event of the
decade in France was the visit to Paris of the Holy Roman
Emperor, Charles IV, in December to January 1377–78.
Coucy’s notable social presence was again called on, as it had
been for the wedding of the Duke of Burgundy, to lend his quality of
grace and splendor to the escort of nobles for the visitor. In the
jeweled glow of the occasion’s majestic pageantry, Charles V’s reign
came to its zenith. The public was awed and gratied by the
splendid ceremonies, and the propaganda value for Valois prestige
probably equaled the incalculable expense.
Although Charles V was the third generation of Valois on the
throne, he was not entirely free of uneasiness about the legitimacy
of the title, the more so because of doubts about his own paternity.
For private and for state reasons, his constant eort was to enhance
the dignity of the crown. Politically his purpose in arranging the
visit was to isolate England by tightening his ties with his uncle the
Emperor, and he also had questions of territorial transfer and
marital arrangements to discuss with him. Emotionally the kinship
was important to him, although he knew his uncle to be calculating
and slippery when it came to the test. Above all, he would have an
occasion for the kind of grandiose public ceremony so important to
medieval rule.
In theory the Holy Roman Emperor exercised a temporal sway
matching the spiritual rule of the Pope over the universal
community under God. Although vestiges of the imperial prestige
remained, neither theory nor title any longer corresponded to
existing reality. Imperial sovereignty in Italy was hardly more than
a sham; it was dwindling on the western fringe of the empire in
Hainault, Holland, and Luxemburg, and retreating in the east before

the growing nationhood of Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland. Its core
was a haphazard federation of German principalities, duchies, cities,
leagues, margraves, archbishoprics, and counties under shifting and
overlapping sovereignties. Hapsburgs and Luxemburgs,
Hohenstaufens, Hohenzollerns, Wittelsbachs, and Wettins despoiled
each other in endless wars; the Ritter or knight lived by robbing the
merchant; every town believed its prosperity depended on the ruin
of its rival; within the towns, merchants and craft guilds contended
for control; an exploited peasantry smoldered and periodically
amed in revolt. The Empire had no political cohesion, no capital
city, no common laws, common nances, or common ocials. It
was the relic of a dead ideal.
As theoretic lay leader of the Christian community, the Emperor
was an elected sovereign currently drawn from the Luxemburg
rulers of Bohemia. Charles IV’s family ties with France, the preferred
home of his father, John the Blind, were close. He had been brought
up at the French court from the age of seven, had married a sister of
Philip VI, and his own sister Bonne had married Philip’s son Jean II.
Though slightly hunchbacked and sallow of skin, he had been
handsome in his prime, with long black hair and beard and lustrous
black eyes. Now 61, he had outlived three wives, wedded a fourth,
and married o seven or eight of his ospring into an intricate
network of Hungarian, Bavarian, and Hapsburg dynasties.
Seemingly aable and meek, he was quick and rm in decision, but
restless and never still. He was given to whittling willow branches
as he listened apparently abstracted to petitioners and advisers, and
then made to each a reply “full of wisdom.” He spoke and wrote
Czech as well as French, Italian, German, and Latin, all equally
prociently. In being cerebral and shrewd, he was like his nephew
Charles V, both being the opposite of irrational, intemperate fathers.
Charles IV was astute enough to recognize that the Empire of his
title was not that of Charlemagne. His central concern was the
Kingdom of Bohemia, whose territorial enlargement and cultural
enrichment he pursued with eect that earned him the title “Father
of His Country.” He himself represented the nationalist tendencies
that were making his imperial title obsolete.

While the Emperor’s welcome was being prepared, Coucy entered
the war with England, not in his home territory of Picardy but in
Languedoc against the Gascons, under the leadership of the Duc
d’Anjou, Governor of Languedoc. Like Lancaster also a king’s
brother, Anjou was driven by ambition for a crown of his own. In
joining him, Coucy forged the connection that within a few years
was to draw him into Anjou’s fateful pursuit of the crown of Naples.
After two months of siege and skirmish in Gascony, Coucy
returned to Paris to serve as an escort to the Emperor. The
welcoming party that was to greet him at Cambrai on the Hainault
border included, besides Coucy, the King’s two chief advisers,
Rivière and Mercier, and many nobles, knights, and squires, making
in all a party of 300 resplendent horsemen. On December 22, they
rode forward a league from the city to meet the advancing guests.
Two hundred of Cambrai’s leading townsmen and clergy, headed by
the Bishop, rode with them through ranks of archers and
commoners stationed at the gates. The Emperor in a furred winter
cloak of gray on a gray horse, together with his eldest son,
Wenceslas, King of the Romans, was escorted into the city, where he
dismounted with some diculty, being aicted by gout, and
accompanied the Bishop to prayers in the church.
His primary purpose in coming, he told the French lords
afterward at dinner, was to visit King Charles and his Queen and
their children whom he wished to see “more than any other
creatures in the world.” When he had accomplished this and
presented his son to them, he would die with a quiet mind
whenever God wished to take him. The Emperor was in fact in the
last year of his life, and perhaps anticipating death, as people did in
a time of few remedies or cures, he may have undertaken the
uncomfortable journey more from a desire to revisit the Paris of his
youth than for political advantage.
At each town in his progress through Picardy and the Ile de
France, delegations met him in ceremonial welcome and presented
gifts of meat, sh, bread, wines, and wagonloads of hay and oats,
paid for by the King. On each occasion the Emperor was careful to

state that he was a guest in a city of the King of France, while his
hosts took pains that no bells should be rung or other rituals
allowed that might signify imperial supremacy. The Emperor’s
choice of a gray horse was a gesture to mark the distinction from an
entry into a town of the Empire, when he customarily rode a white
horse. The emphasis placed by the authorized French chronicle on
these points of protocol shows that the matter was much on the
mind of the French King. Charles V wanted to build up the visit as a
showcase for his claim of a just war, but not to leave his people
under any illusions about the Emperor as overlord or universal
monarch. The elaborate courtesies and festivities he arranged were a
measure of the great signicance he attached to the visit. In the
semi-ocial chronicle of his reign, no less than eighty pages of
detailed account were devoted to it.
At Compiègne near Paris, the Emperor was welcomed by the Duc
de Bourbon, brother of the Queen, with a retinue in new liveries of
parti-colored white and blue. At Senlis the welcomers were the
Dukes of Berry and Burgundy and the Archbishop of Sens with a
suite of 500 all dressed alike in gray and black, the knights in velvet
and the squires in silk of the same colors. Enjoying this spectacle,
the viewer would spread word of the occasion’s grandeur, but its
unhappy hero, whose gout took a turn for the worse, had to forgo a
planned banquet and proceed the rest of the way by means of the
Dauphin’s litter harnessed to two mules and two horses.
At the Abbey of St. Denis, three archbishops, ten bishops, and the
entire Royal Council awaited the Emperor for the visit to the royal
mausoleum, where he had to be lifted from his litter and carried
into the church to pray devoutly at the tomb of St. Louis. Expressing
himself as “madly desirous” to see the famous treasure and relics of
St. Denis, the Emperor was shown the preserved body of the saint,
who, having been martyred by decapitation on the hill of
Montmartre (hence its name), had walked with his head in his
hands to the site where he laid the head down and founded the
abbey. The Emperor gazed for a long time at the relics and the
jeweled crown of St. Louis and the royal tombs, especially of Philip
VI, his onetime brother-in-law.

His entry into Paris, for which the King had planned to present
him with a black war-horse, had to be made instead in the Queen’s
litter. The Provost’s Guard and 2,000 merchants, magistrates, and
citizens of Paris, all on horseback and uniformly dressed in parti-
colored gowns of white and violet, were waiting to escort him to the
meeting with the King. Gout or not, this ceremony had to be
equestrian. Lifted to the saddle, the Emperor, with his son alongside,
awaited the parade advancing toward them from the old palace on
the Ile de la Cité. Not for a generation had Paris witnessed such a
royal procession. Particular care had been taken that, in spite of
great crowds, everyone should be able to see. Guards with mace and
sword were placed at every intersection along the route, and,
warned by criers a day in advance, people were forbidden to cross
the Rue St. Denis. Street barriers were erected and sergeants given
precise orders as to where and when pedestrians and riders could or
could not cross.
First came Marshal Sancerre and his guard wearing two swords
each and rued hats, followed by the King’s trumpeters ourishing
bright pennants from their silver trumpets. The four dukes—Berry,
Burgundy, Bourbon, and the Duc de Bar, husband of the King’s sister
and future father-in-law of Marie de Coucy—rode two by two,
followed by twelve counts, including Coucy as Count of Soissons,
and a long parade of prelates, nobles, judges, councillors, and
ocers of the royal household, each group uniformly dressed
according to function. Chamberlains wore parti-colored velvet or
silk in two shades of scarlet, stewards were in velvet of sky blue and
fawn, grooms of the King’s armor in blue damask, ushers in blue
and red, butlers in white and fawn satin, chefs and squires of the
kitchen in fur-lined silk surcoats with pearl buttons, valets de
chambre in black striped in white and gray, wine stewards in brown
stripes over red.
Last came the scrawny long-nosed King riding a white palfrey and
wearing a fur-lined scarlet mantle and beaked hat “after the ancient
manner.” The length of the procession took half an hour to leave the
palace, and because of the press of people, it was even longer before
the two sovereigns came face to face. Both doed their hats as they

met. Taking care not to rub against the painful legs of his uncle,
Charles placed himself between the Emperor and Wenceslas, and so
they rode three abreast back through the city to the palace.
Seated in a gold-draped chair in the courtyard where once Provost
Marcel had dumped the bodies of the murdered Marshals, the
Emperor heard an address of welcome by his host, and afterward in
their chambers “they removed their hats and spoke together with
great friendship and joy of meeting.” The next days were lled with
banquets, conferences, gift-giving by the goldsmiths of Paris of their
nest art, and special services and viewing of relics in the Sainte
Chapelle, so richly decorated and lighted that “it was a marvel to
see.” In between, the sovereigns held private talks, one lasting three
hours “without even the Chancellor present,” as the Chancellor’s
chronicler took care to note, “and what they said no one knows.”
The state dinners drew on all the resources of the 14th century to
delight, amaze, and glut the guests. So many torchbearers stood like
living candlesticks against the pillars of the great stone hall that
“one could see as well as if it were day.” So many courses and
dishes were served that for once there were “too many to tell,” and
indeed too many for the ailing guest of honor. The King had ordered
four courses of ten pairs of dishes in each, but thoughtfully
eliminated one course of ten to reduce the time the Emperor would
have to sit at table. As it was, he would have had to partake of
thirty pair of such dishes as roast capons and partridges, civet of
hare, meat and sh aspics, lark pasties and rissoles of beef marrow,
black puddings and sausages, lampreys and savory rice, entremet of
swan, peacock, bitterns, and heron “borne on high,” pasties of
venison and small birds, fresh- and salt-water sh with a gravy of
shad “the color of peach blossom,” white leeks with plovers, duck
with roast chitterlings, stued pigs, eels reversed, frizzled beans—
nishing o with fruit wafers, pears, comts, medlars, peeled nuts,
and spiced wine.
So well ordered was the service for 800 guests at the banquet of
January 6 that the low tables were served at the same time and with
the same dishes as the high, and all alike were set with gold and
silver plate. The crowned heads and guests of highest rank sat at

ve tables on raised platforms, each under an individual canopy of
cloth of gold, with the Emperor, King, and Archbishop of Reims at a
marble table in the center. Cloth of gold adorned with eurs-de-lys
made the tablecloths and festooned pillars and windows. Tapestries
covered the walls between. Coucy sat with the Duc de Bourbon at
the table of the nine-year-old Dauphin “to keep him company and
guard him from the great multitude.” Young Marie de Coucy was
among the “great ladies” attending the Queen. At late refreshment
after entertainment by minstrels, the Duc de Berry and his brother
of Burgundy served wine and spices to the King and Emperor, but
whether on horseback, as was often the custom of noble servitors,
the exhausted chronicler fails to say. On a previous visit by the
Emperor to the Count of Savoy in 1365, mounted nobles had served
platters of food poised on the ends of lances especially tted with
brackets for the purpose. Whatever its moral limitations, chivalry
required a strong wrist.
For the grand climax, all 800 guests moved to the Hall of
Parlement, where the spectacle presented to them, representing the
taking of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, was a triumph of the
stagecraft in which the 14th century excelled. Articers at banquets,
as described in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, could bring bodies of
water into the hall, make boats row up and down, grim lions appear,
owers spring from meadows, grapevines grow, and a castle
seemingly made of stone vanish, or “thus it seemed to every
manne’s sight.” At a banquet given in Coucy’s time by a certain
Vidame de Chartres, the ceiling painted like a sky opened to allow
the dinner to descend on machines resembling clouds, which raised
the dishes again when they had been emptied. An articial storm
lasting half an hour accompanied dessert, dropping a rain of scented
water and a hail of sweetmeats.
In the miracle plays and mysteries staged for the populace,
realism was the desired eect. A system of weights and pulleys
resurrected Jesus from the tomb and lifted him to a ceiling of
clouds. Angels and devils were made to appear magically through
trapdoors; Hell opened and closed its monstrous mouth, and Noah’s
ood inundated the stage from casks of water overturned backstage

while stone-lled barrels turned by cranks resounded with thunder.
When John the Baptist was decapitated, the actor was whisked
away so cunningly in exchange for a fake corpse and fake head
spilling ox blood that the audience shrieked in excitement. Actors
playing Jesus sometimes remained tied to the cross reciting verses
for three hours.
More completely than any other medium, the stage mirrored
medieval life. Developing out of liturgical plays performed at the
church door, drama had left the church for the street, where it was
produced by guilds and confréries on wheeled platforms with
dierent scenes drawn along in succession. The plays traveled from
town to town, attracting all of society as audience—peasants and
bourgeois, monks and students, knights and ladies, and the local
seigneur in a front-row seat. For a major performance, criers went
out to inform the public a day in advance. Subject matter was
religious, but manner was secular, designed for entertainment.
Every mystery of the Christian story, and its central mystery of
salvation through the birth and death of Christ, was made physical
and concrete and presented in terms of everyday life—irreverent,
bloody, and bawdy. The shepherds who watched by night were
portrayed as sheep-stealers, pathos in the sacrice of Isaac was
played to the hilt, the favorite comic relief was the on-stage donkey
for Balaam’s ass or for the Virgin to ride on the Flight into Egypt or
for the Three Kings in lieu of camels. The “hin-han” brayed by the
actor inside the donkey’s skin and the turds dropped from a lifted
tail evoked howls of delight even when the donkey bore Jesus into
Jerusalem.
Sex and sadism were relished in the rape of Dinah, in the
exposure of Noah naked and drunk, the sins of the Sodomites, the
peeping of the Elders at Susanna, and all the varieties of torn esh
in the martyrdom of saints. Scenes of torture in revolting realism
were regular theatrical fare, as if a violent time bred enjoyment of
violence. Nero slitting open the belly of his mother to see where he
came from was performed with the aid of gory entrails, supplied by
the local pork butcher, spilling from the victim. Schadenfreude was
not peculiar to the Middle Ages, but it was a dark variety indeed,

induced by plague and successive calamities, that found expression
in gruesome scenes of the tortures on the cross, with the soldiers
shown spitting on the Redeemer of man.
In an age of anxiety, the Miracles of Notre Dame, a series of plays
originating in the second half of the century, supplied what comfort
faith in divine omnipotence could oer. No wretch so poor or
wicked, no misery or injustice but could be remedied by the
miraculous intervention of the Holy Virgin. The most vulnerable
gure of society, a wronged woman, seduced and deserted or falsely
accused of crime, was usually the central gure. In one play a long-
barren woman whose prayers to the Virgin have at last brought her
a son is exhausted by the pains of childbirth and falls asleep while
bathing her baby. When he drowns in the tub, the mother is accused
of child-murder and condemned to the stake. In response to her
husband’s prayers, Notre Dame descends from Heaven to comfort
him, and when the mother, about to be burned, begs for one last
look at her child, he is restored to life in her arms.
Guilty passions, faithless spouses, agonies of childbirth, frail nuns
and pregnant abbesses, adulterous queens, cruel deaths of children
made up the plots. All humanity—proud cardinals and beggars,
baili and butcher’s wife, Jews, innkeepers, riotous students,
knights, wood-cutters, midwives, village fools—were the characters.
The Virgin befriended and forgave them all, even the mother of a
Pope who is so swollen with pride that she thinks herself greater
than the Mother of God. After appropriate punishment, she too
receives grace.
God in the plays was costumed in a white robe with gilt wig and
beard and gilded face, angels had gilded wings, Herod had a black
beard and Saracen’s robes, devils and demons wore grisly masks,
horns, forked tails, and body suits covered with horsehair. Often
they ran through the audience to pinch and frighten the spectators.
Apocalypse, never far out of mind, was enacted in the Day of
Judgment and the Harrowing of Hell when Christ goes down to lead
Adam and the prophets out to Paradise. Anti-Christ appears at his
appointed time, traditionally xed at three and a half years before
the Last Judgment. Born of Satan’s seduction of a woman of

Babylon, and instructed in all the demonic arts, he gains such power
that kings and cardinals pay him homage until he is overthrown at
Armageddon in the triumph of good over evil. The saved are
separated from the damned, and angels empty the vials of wrath.
A Lollard preacher in England, seeking to justify the 14th century
stage, said that men and women seeing the Passion of Christ and his
saints would be moved to “compassion and devotion, weeping bitter
tears, not scorning God but worshiping.” Seeing how the Devil
moved people to lechery and pride and made them his servants to
bring them to Hell, they would be converted to “good living,”
therefore the playing of miracles “turneth men to bileve and not
perverteth.” Perhaps unconvinced by his own argument, he added
reasonably that men must have some recreation and it was better, or
at least less evil, that they took it in the playing of miracles than by
other “japes.”
The siege of Jerusalem played before the Emperor broke away
from previous subject matter to present for the rst time the re-
enactment of a historical event. Its technical marvels and verve of
staged battle were breathtaking. The crusaders’ ship, complete with
mast, sail, and ying banners, was propelled down the hall so
“lightly and softly” as actually to seem to be moving on water.
Knights, wearing the correct heraldry if not costumes of nearly 300
years before, poured from the ship to assault the reconstructed
battlements of Jerusalem. From a painted Moslem tower a muezzin
chanted the wailing Arabic prayer. Saracens in turbans ashed
wicked scimitars, crusaders were thrown from siege ladders, the
onlookers gazed in wonder, stirred by the beauty and excitement to
enthusiasm for a new crusade—which indeed was the purpose of the
performance. The leading propagandist of crusade, Philippe de
Mézières, was much admired by the King, who had appointed him a
member of the Royal Council and tutor of his son.
Next day provided still another wonder. A specially constructed
boat, tted like a residence with halls, chambers, replaces,
chimneys, and a court bed, was provided to convey the royal party
half a mile down the river to the new palace of the Louvre. The
Emperor was visibly impressed. Charles showed him the

reconstructions by which he had transformed the old fortress into a
“true royal palace”—windows and wide staircase, chapels, gardens,
frescoes, paneled rooms, as well as the original weapons room,
where arrows were fashioned and women feathered the shafts. After
dinner the faculties of the University were presented to the
Emperor, who responded in Latin to a formal address by the
University’s chancellor.
Charles’s ultimate purpose, the apotheosis of his case against
England, was reached the following day at a state assembly attended
by fty of the imperial party and about the same number of leading
French personages—royal Dukes, prelates, peers including Coucy,
knights, and members of the Council. According to the chronicler,
the King was motivated by “the lies the English were spreading in
Germany,” but more fundamentally he seems always to have been
seeking some ultimate justication. He would lay before his uncle,
perhaps as a father gure, the concessions he had oered for the
sake of peace and let him judge of their suciency.
Charles spoke for two hours, tracing the ancient quarrel down the
centuries from Eleanor of Aquitaine to the Treaty of Brétigny and
rehearsing the intricate legalities under which the treaty had been
voided and war renewed in 1369. If the speech was a tour de force
of legal and historical argument, the Emperor’s response was a
masterpiece of ornate formula. He spoke of loyalty and kinship, and
the depth of his and his son’s and his subjects’ devotion which
entitled them to be considered the defenders of the King’s honor and
realm, brothers and children—let them indeed be called “allies.”
Yet, when examined, the substance was shadowy. If, in the end, the
speech—and the entire visit—produced no concrete alliance, the
imposing verbal eect may have been what Charles of France
wanted.
He did not stint in further courtesies and gift-giving, exchanging
with the Emperor presents of enameled goblets and jeweled daggers
set with rubies and diamonds, sapphires and pearls. Princely
magnicence, Charles considered, was best displayed by jewels,
tapestries, and the goldsmith’s art. His uncle was not embarrassed to
ask for an exquisite Book of Hours, and when Charles set two before

him, one large and one small from which to choose, the Emperor,
preferring not to select, kept both. Sensibility had its hour when he
visited the Queen and her mother, the dowager Duchess of Bourbon,
whose sister Beatrice had been his rst wife. Tears owed freely in
mutual memory although Beatrice had been dead for thirty years
and her place lled by three wives since. The last day was spent in
sylvan pleasure at Vincennes, where at the edge of the noble forest
on the bank of the river the King had built his favorite country
manor, called Beauté-sur-Marne. Furnished in luxury and comfort
with beautiful tapestries, a Flemish organ, and turtledoves cooing in
the courtyard, it was lauded by the poet Deschamps as “Of all places
pleasant and agreeable, / Gay and lovely for joyous living.”
Departing by way of Reims, the Emperor was escorted to the
frontiers of the kingdom by Coucy and attendant nobles. Possibly
hastened by the exertions of so much ceremonial, his death followed
ten months later in November 1378.
The memorable visit, even if devoid of practical eect, honored
and enhanced the crown of France. Although royal powers were
undened, and the Council’s authority unformulated, and the
institutions of royal government always in ux, Charles V’s sense of
the crown’s role was rm: kingship depended on the King’s will. The
sovereign was not above the law; rather, his duty was to maintain
the law, for God denied Paradise to tyrants. Sanction derived in
theory from the consent of the governed, for kings and princes, as a
great theologian, Jean Gerson, was to remind Charles’s successor,
“were created in the beginning by the common consent of all.” As
Charles knew well, the cult of monarchy was the basis of the
people’s consent. He deliberately fed the cult while at the same time
he was the rst to show that rulership could be exercised “from the
chamber” independent of personal leadership in battle.
In the bright apogee of 1378, France was not immune from
trouble. War had come back to Brittany and Normandy; Charles of
Navarre, as venomous as ever after twenty years, was again in

dangerous league with the English; heresy and sorcery were on the
rise, testifying to needs unsatised by the Church.
For all its dominance, there never was a time when the Church
was not resisted somewhere by dissent. In the distracted 14th
century, when God seemed hostile to man or else hidden behind
ecclesiastical counting of coins and selling of beneces, the need for
communion with God was never greater, nor less satised by His
appointed agents. A Church preoccupied with war in Lombardy and
revenues in Avignon and the mundane necessities of maintaining its
position was not ministering to popular need. The friars’ movements
had been the last eort for reform from within, and when they, too,
succumbed to the lure of endowments, the seekers of spiritual
comfort increasingly sought it outside the Church in the mystical
sects.
The Beghards, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed to be in
a state of grace without benet of priest or sacrament, spread not
only doctrinal but civil disorder. One of the sects of voluntary
poverty that perennially rose against the establishment, they had
ourished for over a century in Germany, the Low Countries, and
northern France, sometimes fading or driven underground by
persecution but re-stimulated in the 14th century by the worldliness
of Avignon and the mendicant orders. Because the Free Spirits
believed God to be in themselves, not in the Church, and considered
themselves in a state of perfection without sin, they felt free to do
all things commonly prohibited to ordinary men. Sex and property
headed the list. They practiced free love and adultery and were
accused of indulging in group sex in their communal residences.
They encouraged nudity to demonstrate absence of sin and shame.
As “holy beggars,” the Brethren claimed the right to use and take
whatever they pleased, whether a market woman’s chickens or a
meal in a tavern without paying. This included the right, because of
God’s immanence, to kill anyone who forcibly attempted to
interfere.
If the Brethren’s habits came to be less pure than their precepts,
the impulse was nevertheless religious. They were in search of

personal salvation, not social justice. Medieval heresies were
concerned with God, not man. Poverty was embraced not only in
imitation of Christ and the Apostles but in deliberate contrast to the
avarice that corrupted men of property. To be without property was
to be without sin. Dissent was not a denial of religion but an excess
of piety in search of a purer Christianity. It became heresy by
denition of the Church, which recognized in the mystics’
renunciation of property the same threat as in Wyclif’s
disendowment.
In monk-like robes deliberately ragged, the Brethren of the Free
Spirit cluttered the towns like sparrows, preaching, begging,
interrupting church services, scorning monks and priests. Drawn
from clerks, students, dissenting clergy, and from the propertied
class, especially women, they were articulate and usually literate.
Women, out of their frustrations and search for ecstasy, were
prominent among the mystics. In the Béguines they had a sect of
their own, a lay order that followed its own religious rule of good
works and, when nunneries had no room, provided a place for
unmarried women and widows, or, as a bishop wrote in criticism of
the Béguines, a retreat from the “coercion of marital bonds.”
Members joined the Béguines by taking an oath of dedication to God
before a parish priest or other cleric, but the movement was never
quite sanctioned by the Church. At street meetings the Béguines
read the Bible translated into French.
While the Brethren of the Free Spirit admitted both sexes, its two
major gospels were written or formulated by women, one a shadowy
gure known only as Schwester Katrei, the other named Marguerite
Porete, who wrote The Mirror of Free Souls and was excommunicated
and burned along with her book in 1310. Following her, the
daughter of a rich merchant of Brussels known as Bloemardine
attracted fervent disciples by her preaching. In 1372 the movement
was condemned by the Inquisition, its books were burned in Paris
on the Place de Grève, and a woman leader of the French group,
Jeanne Dabenton, was burned at the stake together with the corpse
of a male associate who had died in prison. Like the heresy of the

Spiritual Franciscans, the sect of the Free Spirit persisted and spread
in spite of the Inquisition.
Apocalypse was in the air. The Duc d’Anjou in 1376, in the course
of authorizing an annual corpse for dissection by the medical faculty
of Montpellier, took notice that the population was so reduced,
owing to epidemics and wars, that “it may be diminished to ever
greater extent and the world brought to nothing.” Under the
inuence of malign and capricious events, overwrought minds
turned to magic and the supernatural. The Inquisitor of France, on
inquiring of the Pope in 1374 if he should take cognizance of
sorcerers, was authorized by Gregory XI to pursue them vigorously.
Since early in the century the papacy had been taking an
increasingly punitive view of recourse to the supernatural,
especially during the hyperactive reign of John XXII. In a series of
Bulls in the 1320s, Pope John had equated sorcerers with heretics
and authorized their punishment as such, since they had made a
“pact with Hell,” forsaking God and seeking the aid of the Devil. He
ordered their books of magic lore to be sought out and burned.
Despite his alarm, prosecuted cases were few until the second half of
the century, when sorcery and its links to demonology took on new
life and were met by new eorts at repression. In 1366 the Council
of Chartres ordered anathema to be pronounced against sorcerers
every Sunday in every parish church.
Demonology and the black arts were the opposite of heresy, not
more pious than the Church but impious, seeking communion with
the Devil, not God. Adepts in their rites worshiped Lucifer arrayed
as the King of Heaven and believed that he and the other fallen
angels would recapture Heaven while the Archangel Michael and his
fellows would take their places in Hell. A pact with the Devil oered
pleasure without penitence, enjoyment of sexuality, riches, and
earthly ambitions. If the price was eternal hellre, that was what
many could expect anyway at the Day of Judgment. Though old and
indigenous, demonology was never more than an aberration, but
insofar as it oered an alternative answer, it was seen by the Church
as dangerous.

The problem was to distinguish between diabolic and lawful
magic powers. Respectable sorcerers claimed that their images of
wax or lead acquired potency through being baptized and exorcised,
that their mysteries were consecrated by celebration of the mass,
that God was invoked to compel the obedience of demons—indeed,
that God owed from their arts, as proved by the fulllment of
wishes. Theologians disallowed such pretensions. Even if it was only
to recover a straying lover or cure a peasant’s sick cow, sorcerers
were oering aid outside the approved channel of prayer, priests,
and saints. As the times darkened, all magic and witchcraft came to
be taken as an implied contract with Satan.
Women turned to sorcery for the same reasons they turned to
mysticism. In Paris in 1390 a woman whose lover had jilted her was
tried for taking revenge by employing the magical powers of
another woman to render him impotent. Both were burned at the
stake. In the following year two more women were condemned on
charges of maleciam or doing evil. Since confessions in trials for
sorcery were extracted by torture, they tended to reect the
accusations of diabolic power drawn up by the prosecutors, and
since the accused were likely to be cranks or fanatics or otherwise
disturbed, they did not hesitate to claim the powers imputed to
them. They admitted to consorting with demons and to pacts with
the Devil for lust or revenge, to diabolic rites and ights through the
night to copulate with the Devil in the shape of a monstrous black
cat or goat with aming eyes or a gigantic man with black skin, a
huge phallus, and eyes like burning coals. The Devil was a Gothic
satyr with horns and cloven hoofs, erce teeth and claws, a
sulfurous smell and sometimes ass’s ears. The lore developed as
much from the minds of the prosecutors as from the hallucinations
of the accused, and together they laid the ground for the rage
against witchcraft that was to explode upon the next century.
The clear voice of common sense spoke through the King’s adviser
in philosophy, Nicolas Oresme, who despised both astrology and
sorcery. A man of scientic spirit though a bishop, he was a
mathematician and astronomer and translator of the Politics and
Ethics of Aristotle. One of his books began with the sentence, “The

earth is round like a ball,” and he postulated a theory of the earth’s
rotation. Refuting the powers ascribed to sorcerers, he denied that
they could invoke demons, although he did not rule out the
existence of demons. Not all things, he wrote, could be explained by
natural causes; some marvels or extraordinary strokes of fortune
must be the work of angels or demons, but he preferred to look for a
natural and rational explanation. Magicians, he pointed out, were
adept at using aids to favor illusions—darkness, mirrors, drugs, or
gases and fumes that could be made to give rise to visions. The basis
for illusion was likely to be an abnormal state of mind induced by
fasting or by frightening phenomena. A man ahead of his time,
Oresme suggested that the source of demons and specters could be
the disease of melancholy. He also made the point that evidence for
sorcery was derived from confessions under torture, and that many
miracles were fraudulently devised by the clergy to increase
oerings to their churches.
Oresme proves the frailty of generalization. He was highly
esteemed by the same King in whose employ the astrologer Thomas
of Pisano fashioned wax images to destroy the English.
Scientic spirit could not dispel the sense of a malign inuence
upon the times. As the century entered its last quarter, the reality
and power of demons and witches became common belief. The
theological faculty of the University of Paris in a solemn conclave at
the end of the century declared that ancient errors and evils, almost
forgotten, were emerging with renewed vigor to infect society. They
drew up a statement of 28 articles to disprove, not the power of the
black arts, but their lawfulness. No less emphatically they rejected
the incredulity of those who questioned the existence and activity of
demons.
Unorthodoxy, as always, made disproportionate noise. Heresy and
sorcery, though increasingly signicant, were not the norm. In 1378
the real danger to the Church emerged from within.

Chapter 16

I
The Papal Schism
n Italy the war for control of the Papal States had renewed itself
in 1375. During the temporary peace, Italian hatred of the
papacy’s mercenaries and French legates had not subsided but
swelled. The agents of a French Pope ruled with the contempt of
colonial governors for natives. When the nephew of the Abbot of
Montmayeur, legate in Perugia, was seized by desire for the wife of
a Perugian gentleman and, breaking into her chamber, would have
ravished her by force, the lady, seeking escape by the window to an
adjoining house, lost her footing, fell to the street, and was killed. In
response to a delegation of outraged citizens who demanded justice
against his nephew, the Abbot said carelessly, “Quoi donc! [What
then!] Did you suppose all Frenchmen were eunuchs?” The tale
spread from city to city, feeding the antagonism of which Florence
now made herself the champion.
Establishment of a strong papal state at her borders was felt by
Florence as a threat, heightened by the incursion into Tuscany of
Hawkwood during a lapse in papal pay. Forced to buy him o at a
huge cost of 130,000 orins, the Florentines believed he had been
encouraged to come against them by the Pope. Anti-papism now
pervaded Florentine politics in a wild swing of the perpetual feud of
Guelf and Ghibelline. Described in exasperation by a later French
Governor of Genoa, this ancient roil kept Italians at each other’s
throats out of inherited, witless animosity.
For with no other quarrel of land or seigneury, they have only to say, “You
are Guelf and I am Ghibelline; we must hate each other,” and for this reason
only and knowing no other, they kill and wound each other every day like
dogs, the sons like the fathers, and so year by year the malice continues and
there is no justice to remedy it.… And from this come the despots of this

country, elected by the voice of the people, without reason or right of law.
For as soon as one party prevails over the other and is the stronger, then
those who see themselves on top cry “Long live so-and-so!” and “Death to so-
and-so” and they elect one of their number and kill their adversary if he does
not ee. And when the other party regains the advantage, they do the same
and in the fury of the people, from which God protect us, all is torn to pieces.
Until now, popular antagonism toward the papal party
represented by the Guelfs had not reached the point of taking up
arms against the Church. When during a food scarcity in 1374–75
papal legates embargoed the export of grain from the Papal States to
Florence, passions reached the point of belligerence. Under the
slogan Libertas inscribed in gold on a red banner, Florence organized
a revolt of the Papal States in 1375 and formed a league against the
papacy, joined by Milan, Bologna, Perugia, Pisa, Lucca, Genoa, and
all the various potentates who had territorial ambitions in the Papal
States.
To one chronicler it seemed “as if these times are under the rule
of a planet which produces strife and quarreling.” In an Augustinian
monastery near Siena, he recorded, “the monks murdered their Prior
with a knife,” and in a neighboring abbey, after intramural ghting,
“six brethren were turned out.” Because of quarreling among the
Carthusians, the General of the order came and moved them all to
other houses. “It was no better among kinsfolk by blood.… The
whole world was ghting. In Siena there was no one who kept his
word, the people disagreed with their leaders and agreed with no
one, and truly the whole world was a valley of shadows.”
The revolt brought into action an individual destined to be the
catalyst of new calamity. Robert of Geneva, the Pope’s Legate in
Italy, was a cardinal of 34 who shrank from no force to regain
control of the papal patrimony. A brother of the Count of Geneva, a
descendant of Louis VII and cousin of Charles V, a relative of the
Counts of Savoy and of half the sovereign houses of Europe, he
shared the lack of inhibition characteristic of so many princes. He
was lame and squinting, and described as either squat and fat or
handsome and well formed, depending on partisanship in the

coming schism. Imposing and autocratic in manner, he was
sonorous of voice, eloquent with tongue and pen, cultivated and
well read in several languages, sophisticated and artful in his
management of men.
To reconquer the Papal States, he persuaded Gregory XI to hire
the Bretons, worst of the mercenary bands, with the extra incentive
of removing them from the vicinity of Avignon. Crossing the Alps
into Lombardy in May 1376, they spread terror across Italy with
swords blessed and consecrated by the Cardinal Legate. They failed,
however, to take Bologna, keystone of the Papal States, and suered
several defeats by the Florentines, to the wrath of their employer.
With the fury of a conqueror deed, Cardinal Robert determined to
set an example by atrocity and found his occasion at Cesena, a town
near the east coast between Ravenna and Rimini. When the Bretons
who were quartered there seized supplies without paying for them,
they provoked an armed rising of the citizens. Swearing clemency
by a solemn oath on his cardinal’s hat, Cardinal Robert persuaded
the men of Cesena to lay down their arms, and won their condence
by asking for fty hostages and immediately releasing them as
evidence of good will. Then summoning his mercenaries, including
Hawkwood, from a nearby town, he ordered a general massacre “to
exercise justice.” Meeting some demurral, he insisted, crying,
“Sangue et sangue!” (Blood and more blood!), which was what he
meant by justice.
He was obeyed. For three days and nights beginning February 3,
1377, while the city gates were closed, the soldiers slaughtered. “All
the squares were full of dead.” Trying to escape, hundreds drowned
in the moats, thrust back by relentless swords. Women were seized
for rape, ransom was placed on children, plunder succeeded the
killing, works of art were ruined, handicrafts laid waste, “and what
could not be carried away, they burned, made unt for use or
spilled upon the ground.” The toll of the dead was between 2,500
and 5,000. From the sacked city, 8,000 refugees ed to Rimini
begging for alms. A generation later the great preacher Bernardino
of Siena still made audiences tremble with the tale of horror.

“Not to be held entirely infamous,” Hawkwood, it was said, sent a
thousand women to safety in Rimini and allowed some men to
escape. Carrying out the solution threatened by Solomon, he was
also reported to have cleft in half a nun over whom two of his
soldiers were ghting. On the whole, however, he had more relish
for money than for killing, and shortly after the massacre of Cesena
he abandoned the papal employ, where pay was slack, for more
lucrative contracts oered by Florence and Milan. To make
employment of the great mercenary permanent, Bernabò Visconti
gave one of his illegitimate daughters by a favorite mistress in
marriage to Hawkwood with a dowry of 10,000 orins. The political
resources of a prince with 36 living children were far-reaching.
For his remaining two decades Hawkwood lived in riches and
respect, elected Captain of Florence by the Signoria, and paid for his
services, or for immunity, by almost all the city-states of central and
northern Italy. He bequeathed to Italy an example of successful
rapine to inspire Italian condottieri—Jacopo del Verme, Malatesta,
Colleoni, Sforza—who were soon to replace the foreign captains.
Robert of Geneva, who became for Italy the “Man of Blood” and
“Butcher of Cesena,” never attempted to excuse or extenuate his
action. As far as he was concerned, the citizens were rebels like
those of Limoges to the Black Prince. His resort to terror, resounding
through Italy, did not enhance the authority of the Church. “People
no longer believe in the Pope or Cardinals,” wrote a chonicler of
Bologna on the massacre, “for these are things to crush one’s faith.”
Meanwhile, Florence was excommunicated by the Pope, who
invited non-Florentines to prey upon the commerce of the outlaw.
Her caravans could be seized, debts could not be collected, clients
were not bound to keep their contracts. Florence retaliated by
expropriating ecclesiastical property and forcing local clergy to keep
churches open in deance of the ban. Popular sentiment was so
aroused that the Committee of Eight who directed strategy were
called the Eight Saints, and the conict with the papacy came to be
known in Italian annals as the War of the Eight Saints.
By now both sides had reason to want to end the war. Besides
drastic eect on Florentine commerce, the excommunication had

divisive eects on the league. To hold the multiple rivalries of
Italian city-states in cohesion for long was impossible. For the
papacy to maintain control of the Papal States from Avignon was
equally impossible, and a new danger was added when Florence
oered inducements to Rome to join the league. It was as apparent
to Gregory as to his predecessor that necessity was calling the
papacy home. A clamorous voice at his elbow was adding force to
the summons.
Since June 1376, Catherine of Siena, who was to be canonized
within a century of her death and ultimately named patron saint of
Italy along with Francis of Assisi, had been in Avignon exhorting the
Pope to signal reform of the Church by returning to the Holy See.
Already at 29 a gure with an ardent following and an insistent
voice, she was revered for her trances and raptures and her claim to
have received, while in ecstasy after communion, the stigmata of the
ve wounds of Christ on hands, feet, and heart. While these
remained visible only to her, such was her repute that Florence
commissioned her as ambassador to negotiate reconciliation with
the Pope and a lifting of the interdict. Catherine’s larger mission in
her own mind was apostleship for all humanity through her own
total incorporation with God and Jesus, and through a cleansing and
renewing of the Church. Her authority was the voice of God
speaking directly to her, and preserved in the Dialogues dictated to
her secretary-disciples and believed by them to have been “given in
person by God the Father, speaking to the mind of the most glorious
and holy virgin, Catherine of Siena … she being the while entranced
and actually hearing what God spoke in her.”
Behind the trances were extreme austerities of fasting and
deprivations of sleep and comfort. The more extreme in such
practices, the more a person was removing himself from material
life. (According to La Tour Landry, “To eat once a day is the life of
an angel; twice a day the right life of men and women; more than
that the life of a beast”). Catherine was reported to have lived on
hardly more than a little raw lettuce, and if forced to eat, to turn her

head away and spit out what she had chewed or cause herself to
vomit lest any food or liquid remain in her stomach. She had
practiced asceticism since the age of seven, when she saw her rst
visions, perhaps not unconnected with being the youngest of 23
children. Thereafter she stubbornly secluded herself from the
worldly commotion of a large family in a dyer’s household, and
dedicated her virginity to Christ.
The ecstasies of the union were very real to Catherine, as they
were to many women who escaped the marital bond by entering
religious life. Christ conrmed her betrothal, Catherine wrote, “not
with a ring of silver but with a ring of his holy esh, for when he
was circumcised just such a ring was taken from his holy body.”
Taught to read at the age of twenty by a Dominican sister of noble
family, Catherine read the Song of Songs over and over, repeating in
her prayers the sigh of the bride, “May he kiss me with the kiss of
his mouth,” and was rewarded when Jesus appeared to her and
bestowed upon her “a kiss which lled her with unutterable
sweetness.” After her prolonged prayers to be xed in “perfect faith”
and to become an instrument for the salvation of erring souls, Jesus
took her for his bride in a ceremony performed by his Holy Mother
and attended by St. John, St. Paul, and St. Dominic, with music
from David’s harp.
As a tertiary or non-cloistered member of the Dominicans,
Catherine threw herself into the care of humanity, seeking out
prisoners, the poor, and the sick, tending the plague victims of 1374
among whom two of her siblings and eight nieces and nephews
died. In an extreme episode she sucked pus from the cancerous sore
of a hospital patient as if acting out the mystics’ insistence on direct
contact with the wounds of Christ as the source of spiritual
experience.
In the words of the German mystic Johannes Tauler, Catherine’s
contemporary, it was necessary “to press one’s mouth to the wounds
of the crucied.” The blood that owed from the wounds, from the
thorns, from the agellation, obsessed religious fanatics. It was a
sacred bath to cleanse sin. To drink it, to wash the soul with it was
salvation. Tauler dwelt on the subject for so long in his thoughts

that he felt he must have been present at the source. He calculated
the number of lashes and knew that Jesus had been tied so tightly to
the column that the blood spurted from his nails; that he had been
whipped on the back and then on the chest until he was one great
wound. St. Brigitta in her revelations saw his bloody footsteps when
he walked and how, when crowned with thorns, “his eyes, his ears,
his beard ran with blood; his jaw distended, his mouth open, his
tongue swollen with blood. His stomach was pulled in so that it
touched his spine as if he had no more intestines.”
Catherine herself hardly ever spoke of Christ, her bridegroom,
without mentioning blood—“blood of the Lamb,” “the keys of the
blood,” “blood lled with eternal divinity,” “drinking the blood of
the heart of Jesus.” Sangue was in every sentence; sangue and dolce
(blood and sweet) were her favorite words. Words poured from her
in a torrent unhindered by need of pen. Even her devoted confessor,
Raymond of Capua, a cultivated nobleman and future General of the
Dominican Order, sometimes fell asleep under the redundant ow.
That so much of Catherine’s talk was preserved was owed to the
astonishing capacity of medieval scribes to record verbatim the
prolix speech of the period. Speech was customarily lled with
repetition to allow time for the listener to absorb what was being
said. Information and learning were still largely acquired through
listening to heralds, sermons, orations, and reading aloud, and for
that very reason, scribes, before the age of printing, were far better
trained to take down the spoken word than at any time since.
As word spread of Catherine’s visions and fasting, people came to
see her in her trances. Between raptures, in moods of earthly and
warmhearted common sense, she settled civil quarrels and
converted notorious rascals to penitence and faith. She acquired
fame and worshipful disciples to whom she felt as a mother, calling
them to her, as she put it, “as a mother calls a child to her breast.”
They in turn called her Mamma. From 1370 on, she took an
increasing part in public life, exhorting rulers, prelates, town
councils, and individuals in eusive letters of political and spiritual
advice.

Her inuence lay in her absolute conviction that God’s will and
hers were one. “Do God’s will and mine!” she commanded Charles V
in a letter urging crusade, and to the Pope in the same tone she
wrote, “I demand … that you set forth to ght the indels!” Next to
reform, “holy sweet crusade” was her incessant theme. Gregory
himself, in all the letters of his ponticate, was an advocate of
crusade, not only for defensive war against the Turks, but as a
means of reconciling France and England and draining the
mercenaries from Europe. While Catherine pleaded for peace at
home, crying, “Woe, woe, peace, peace, for God’s sake …,” she
implored all the potentates no less heartily to visit war upon the
indel. For her, crusade had an exalted religious value in itself. This
was Christians’ work for the greater glory of God, and the more
earnest its advocates, like Catherine and Philippe de Mézières, the
more ardent their summons to war.
“Be a man, Father, arise!… No negligence!” she hectored the
Pope. Hawkwood was likewise exhorted to rise against Christ’s
enemies instead of tormenting Italy with misery and ruin. In a letter
addressed to “Messer Giovanni condottiere,” delivered in person by
Father Raymond, she wrote, “Therefore I pray you sweetly, since
you delight so much in making war and ghting, make no more war
upon Christians because it oends God.” Rather, she told him, go to
ght the Turks so that, “from being the servant and soldier of the
Devil, you might become a manly and true knight.”
Catherine’s favorite admonition was “Be manly!” In her devotions,
the Virgin Mary hardly appeared, all Catherine’s passion being
absorbed by the Son. Yet in worldly aairs she often appealed to
feminine inuence, writing not to Bernabò Visconti but to his
strong-minded wife, Regina; not to the King of Hungary but to his
dominant mother, Elizabeth of Poland. Of the Duc d’Anjou, whom
she envisioned as leader of the crusade, she begged that he (of all
people) despise the pleasures and vanities of this world and unite
himself to the cross and the passion of Jesus in holy war. When she
visited him and the Duchess in person, the Duke, who among his
other ambitions was quite prepared to lead a crusade, accepted the
mission.

In Avignon she was oppressed by the atmosphere of sensuality
and “stench of sin,” and by the curiosity of the grand ladies who
poked and pinched her body to test her trances after communion or
even pierced her foot with a long needle. To the Pope, whom she
addressed in a familiar version of Holy Father as “my sweet papa”
(dolce babbo mio), she poured out all her themes in endless letters
and in public and private audiences in which Raymond of Capua
acted as interpreter because Catherine spoke in the Tuscan dialect
and the Pope in Latin. Let him begin reform through the
appointment of worthy priests, she demanded, let him pacify Italy
not by arms but by mercy and pardon, let him return to Rome not
with armed guard and sword but with cross in hand like the Blessed
Lamb, “for it seems to me that Divine Goodness is preparing to
change furious wolves into lambs … and I will bring them
humiliated to your bosom.… Oh, Father, peace for the love of God!”
All the suering under the “furious wolves” of her time spoke
through her voice, and all the craving for religious reform. For most
people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions. In
Germany in 1372 papal tax-collectors were seized, mutilated,
imprisoned, some even strangled, and the clergy of Cologne, Bonn,
and Mainz pledged themselves not to pay the tenth demanded by
Gregory XI. In parishes wrecked by the mercenaries, the tithes
reduced priests to penury. Many deserted, leaving villages without
communion or sacraments, and empty churches to rot or be used for
barns. Some priests supplemented their too meager pay by
occupation as taverners or horse-dealers or other work disallowed
for the clergy as inhonesta.
In the upper ranks, property and worldly oces absorbed the
prelates, to the neglect of care for the diocese. Because the Church
could oer to ambitious men a career of power and riches, many
who entered it were more concerned with material than with
spiritual reward. “Fear of God is thrown away,” lamented Brigitta in
Rome, “and in its place is a bottomless bag of money.” All the Ten
Commandments, she said, had been reduced to one: “Bring hither
the money.”

Conscious of its failings, the Church issued streams of orders
reproving profane dress, concubinage, lack of zeal, but it was tied to
the things of Caesar and could not reform at the root without
destroying its vested interests. It had become dependent on the
nancial system developed in the exile at Avignon, and while
everyone acknowledged the need of reform, the hierarchy was
bound, in the nature of things, to resist it. Even Catherine in a
moment of clarity knew reform could not come from within. “Do
not weep now,” she said to Father Raymond when he burst into
tears at some new scandal for the Church, “for you will have still
more to weep for” when in the future not only laymen but clerics
would rise against the Church. As soon as the Pope attempted
reform, she said, the prelates would resist, and the Church “will be
divided, as it were by a heretical pestilence.”
Catherine herself was never heretical, never disillusioned, never
disobedient. The Church, the papacy, the priesthood, the Dominican
order were her home, and their sanctity her foundation. She
scolded, but from within the fold. Disenchantment among the clergy
itself produced the great heretics, Wyclif and, in the next
generation, Jan Hus.
Catherine’s appeals gave Gregory XI the strength to resist the
pressures exerted by the French King and cardinals against return of
the papacy to Rome. Charles V insisted that “Rome is wherever the
Pope happens to be,” and sent his brothers, the Dukes of Anjou and
Burgundy, to try to dissuade the Pope. In the same eort, the
cardinals argued against going to Rome just when the Kings of
France and England, “so long divided by a war which destroys the
whole world,” were conducting peace parleys that required his aid.
Gregory was unmoved. Despite somber presentiments, he believed
that only his presence could hold Rome for the papacy, and when
Rome promised submission if he would return, he could postpone
no longer.
Confounding all expectations of his French birth and feeble
health, he departed in September 1376 despite a fearful storm that

damaged his ships as if in warning. At the last moment his aged
father, Count Guillaume de Beaufort, in the unrestrained physical
gesture of the time, threw himself prone before his son in a plea to
stay. Gregory stepped over his parent, murmuring unlially from
the Psalms, “It is written that thou shalt trample on the adder and
tread down the basilisk.” One of his bishops, going by land, wrote,
“Oh God, if only the mountains would move and block our way.”
Owing to the insecurity of the region, Rome was not entered until
January 1377, and fteen months later, in March 1378, Gregory
died. In the interval he had struggled as helplessly as his
predecessor, Urban V, in the turmoil of Italian politics. Beset by
diculties and ceaselessly goaded by the French cardinals to return
to Avignon, he was said to have agreed, but, feeling the approach of
death, deliberately waited to die in Rome in order that the election
of a new Pope should take place there and keep the papacy where it
belonged. His worthy intention precipitated the crisis that was to
damage the medieval Church beyond repair.
The schism had nothing to do with doctrine or religious issue.
Sixteen cardinals were present in Rome for the conclave, of whom
one was Spanish, four were Italian, and eleven were divided
between two hostile French parties of Limousins and Gallicans.
Since neither French party was prepared to elect a Pope from the
other, hectic canvassing for votes took place in which Robert of
Geneva, leader of the Gallicans, was active even before Gregory was
dead. When the necessary two-thirds majority could not be
assembled for any one of the cardinals, sentiment gathered for an
outsider as a compromise candidate who could ensure that neither
French party would triumph over the other. He was Bartolomeo
Prignano, Archbishop of Bari and Vice-Chancellor of the Curia, a
Neapolitan of lowly birth, short, stout, swarthy, hard-working, and
apparently unassuming. Through long service in Avignon he was
considered a pliable protégé by both French groups. Although a
strong opponent of simony and corruption, with the excitable
temper of the south Italian, he was thought by the cardinals, as their

social inferior, to be governable and, above all, amenable to a return
to Avignon.
On Gregory’s death, the citizens of Rome, seeing at last a chance
to end the reign of French popes, sent a deputation of important
citizens to the Vatican to urge the election of a “worthy man of the
Italian nation,” specically a Roman. The College contained two
Romans, Cardinal Tebaldeschi of St. Peter’s, “a good saintly man”
but aged and inrm, and Cardinal Orsini, considered too young and
inexperienced. Both were unwanted by their colleagues for the very
reason that they were Roman.
Clearly expecting trouble on this score, the French cardinals
moved their households with all their valuables, plate, jewels,
money, and books, and the papal treasury, into the Castel
Sant’Angelo, and demanded security measures by the city to assure
public order and protect them against violence and insults. Taking
no chances, Cardinal Robert of Geneva donned a coat of mail; the
Spanish Cardinal Pedro de Luna dictated his will. Because the
cardinals gave no pledge of a Roman, rumor spread that a French-
dominated Pope would mean return of the papacy to Avignon.
Public excitement rose and threatening crowds gathered as the
cardinals, surrounded by “many strong soldiers and warlike nobles,”
entered the Vatican for the conclave. Beneath the windows they
could hear the populace howling, “Romano lo volemo! [We want a
Roman!] Romano! Romano!” The specter of the deaths of Cola di
Rienzi and Jacob van Artevelde, lynched by the mob, rose to the
surface.
In fear for their lives, the cardinals resorted to dressing the
trembling old Cardinal Tebaldeschi, over his protests, in the miter
and cope to be exhibited on the throne as elected Pope for long
enough to allow his colleagues to escape from the Vatican to
fortied places outside the city. As the bells of St. Peter’s pealed
amid clash and confusion, word of the hoax was learned. The
crowd’s shrieks turned to “Non le volemo!” and “Death to the
cardinals!” Swords were drawn and drunks who had broken into the
papal cellars grew rough and uproarious.

Next day, April 9, the cardinals announced the election of the
Archbishop of Bari as Urban VI and, under heavy guard, escorted
him on a white palfrey amid “angry faces” on the traditional ride to
the Lateran. Notice of the election and enthronement was conveyed
to the six cardinals remaining in Avignon, with no suggestion of
possible invalidity by reason of intimidation. On the contrary, in the
rst weeks of the new reign the cardinals treated Urban’s ponticate
as so much an accomplished fact that they showered him with the
usual petitions for beneces and promotions for their relatives.
Papal power, raising him to authority over the high-born
cardinals, went instantly to Urban’s head. From a humble
unspectacular ocial totally unprepared for the papal throne, he
was transformed overnight into an implacable scourge of simony,
moved less by religious zeal than by simple hatred and jealousy of
privilege. He publicly chastised the cardinals for absenteeism,
luxury, and lascivious life, forbade them to hold or sell plural
beneces, prohibited their acceptance of pensions, gifts of money,
and other favors from secular sources, ordered the papal treasurer
not to pay them their customary half of the revenue from beneces
but to use it for the restoration of churches in Rome. Worse, he
ordered these princes of the Church to restrict their meals to one
course.
He berated them without tact or dignity, his face growing purple
and his voice hoarse with rage. He interrupted them with rude
invective and cries of “Rubbish!” and “Shut your mouth!” He called
Cardinal Orsini a sotus (half-wit), and moved to strike the Cardinal
of Limoges, only stopped by Robert of Geneva, who pulled him
back, crying, “Holy Father, Holy Father, what are you doing?” He
accused the Cardinal of Amiens, when acting as mediator between
France and England, of accepting money from both sides and
prolonging discord to keep his purse lled, causing that Cardinal to
rise and with “indescribable haughtiness” to call His Holiness a
“liar.”
Carried away by self-assertion, Urban plunged into the secular
aairs of Naples, announcing that the kingdom was badly governed
because the ruler, Queen Joanna, was a woman, and threatening to

put her in a nunnery or depose her because of failure to pay the
dues of Naples as a papal ef. This gratuitous quarrel, which he
pursued with venom, was to provide a base for his enemies.
The feelings of the men who had raised Urban over their own
heads probably cannot be adequately described. Some thought that
the delirium of power had made the Pope furiosus et melaneholicus—
in short, mad. Rages and insults might have been borne, but not
interference with revenue and privilege. When Urban atly refused
to return to Avignon as arranged, the crisis came. Rather than try, as
once before with an obstreperous Pope, any half-measure requiring
him to sign “Capitulations” of his authority, the cardinals decided
on the fatal course of removal. Since there was no procedure for
ousting a Pope for untness, their plan was to annul the election as
invalid on grounds that it had been conducted under duress from
mob violence. Unquestionably they had been terried when they
elected Urban, but equally clearly they had decided to elect him
before a threat was heard.
The rst hints of an invalid election were circulated in July 1378,
and the cardinals began assembling military support through the
Duke of Fondi, a nobleman of the Kingdom of Naples. In the
meantime, the Romans and their armed forces rallied to Urban, who
had won their support by his refusal to go back to Avignon. He
reinforced his position by concluding peace with Florence and
lifting the interdict, to the jubilation of the people. His messenger
bearing the olive branch for once made the papacy popular with the
Florentines. Lines were being drawn. Guarded by the Breton
mercenaries of Sylvestre Budes, who had been with Coucy in
Switzerland, the cardinals moved out of Rome to the papal summer
resort at Anagni. Here on August 9 they issued a Declaration to all
Christendom pronouncing Urban’s election void on the ground that
it had been conducted in “fear of their lives” to the sound of
“tumultuous and horrible voices.” After declaring the Holy See
vacant, they rejected in advance any arbitration by an Ecumenical
Council on the grounds that only a Pope could call a Council. In a
further manifesto, they anathemetized Urban as “Anti-Christ, devil,
apostate, tyrant, deceiver, elected-by-force.”

Repudiation of a Pope was so fateful an act that it is impossible to
suppose the cardinals envisaged a schism. Rather, they acted in the
belief that by withdrawing in a body from the Curia, they could
compel Urban to resign, or at worst depose him by force of arms. In
a test of strength Budes’s company, acting as their military arm, had
already defeated a company of the Pope’s Roman supporters in a
skirmish in July.
The cardinals moved rst to secure the support of Charles V. All
the information received by the King of France was heavily
weighted against Urban, and his political interest at any rate leaned
in the same direction. He summoned a council of prelates and
doctors of law and theology on September 11 to listen to the
cardinals’ envoys make their case. After two days of deliberation,
the council soberly advised the King to abstain from a precipitous
decision one way or another on “so high, perilous and doubtful” an
issue. If this was hedging, it was also a well-advised caution which
Charles did not follow. Though he did nothing overt, later
developments indicate that he must have conveyed assurance of
support to the cardinals—the major error of policy-making in his
record.
After further legal preparation and eorts to obtain approval from
the University of Paris, which was not forthcoming, the cardinals
moved to Fondi, inside the territory of Naples, and in a conclave of
September 20 elected a new Pope from among their number.
Seeking, in the circumstances, a forceful and decisive man they
made an incredible choice. The person elected, enthroned, and
crowned as Clement VII all on the same day was Robert of Geneva,
the “Butcher of Cesena.”
The election of an Anti-Pope was bound to be divisive, and the
interests of the papacy might have been supposed to dictate a choice
as acceptable as possible to Italians. To elect the man feared and
loathed throughout Italy suggests an arrogance of power almost as
mad as the behavior of Urban. Perhaps by this time the 14th century
was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of
sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally
mad.” Dominated by the French, the College of Cardinals was

unconcerned about Italian feelings and so threatened by curtailment
of its revenues in the name of reform that even the three* Italian
cardinals gave tacit consent to the vote. This was the end product of
the exile in Avignon. Only a profound materialism and cynicism
could have permitted the placing of Robert of Geneva in the chair of
St. Peter. The complaints of the reformers could have had no more
telling proof.
“Oh, unhappy men!” cried Catherine, voicing the Italian reaction,
“you who were to nourish yourselves at the breast of the Church, to
be as owers in her garden, to shed forth sweet perfume, to be as
pillars to support the Vicar of Christ and his bark, as lamps for the
enlightenment of the world and diusion of the faith … you who
were angels upon earth, have turned to the way of devils.… What is
the cause? The poison of selshness destroys the world.” If her rich
imagery was mixed, it was also a measure of the reverence felt for
the great ones of the Church and the corresponding sense of
betrayal. With the native common sense that often broke through
her verbal rhapsodies, Catherine gave no credit to the cardinals’
claim of having elected Urban under duress.
Far from resigning, Urban created an entirely new College of
Cardinals within a week and hired a company of mercenaries under
one of the rst Italian condottieri, Alberigo da Barbiano, to maintain
his See by force of arms. War on schismatics gave Catherine a new
holy cause. “Now is the time for new martyrs,” she encouraged
Urban. “You are the rst who have given your blood; how great is
the fruit you will receive!” And so it proved, initially. In a battle
against the forces of his rival, commanded by Sylvestre Budes and
the Count of Montjoie, Clement’s nephew, Urban’s forces were
victorious. They regained the Castel Sant’Angelo and took prisoner
the two enemy captains, with the result that Clement had to ee
Rome and take refuge with Joanna of Naples. So hostile was the
populace, however, crying “Death to the Anti-Christ! Death to
Clement and his cardinals! Death to the Queen if she protects
them!” that he was forced to leave. With no safety for him anywhere
in Italy, he returned with his cardinals to Avignon in April 1379.

With one Pope and College of Cardinals in Rome and another
Pope and College in Avignon, the schism was now a terrible fact. It
was to become the fourth scourge—after war, plague, and the Free
Companies—of a tormented century. Since the election at Fondi,
every sovereign power had taken sides, often with divisive eect
between ruler and clerics, or clerics and people. Charles V
recognized Clement ocially in November 1378 and issued a
proclamation forbidding obedience to Urban by anyone, cleric or
lay, within the realm. He rejected settlement by an Ecumenical
Council as advocated by the University of Paris, because he wanted
no solution that might prove contrary to French interest. The
University, profoundly troubled, was forced to comply.
England, in natural opposition to France and a French Pope,
remained loyal to Urban; Scotland of course took the other side.
Flanders, though a ef of France, remained Urbanist largely because
the Count of Flanders was following a pro-English policy in the war.
The Emperor Charles IV died just in time to be spared a decision,
but his son and successor, Wenceslas, so recently and lavishly
entertained in Paris, declared for Urban and carried most of the
Empire with him, except for certain areas such as Hainault and
Brabant closely linked to France. The stand taken by the new
Emperor, followed by Hungary, Poland, and Scandinavia, was a
bitter disappointment to Charles V, who had thought his own
decision would draw other sovereigns in its wake, leaving Urban
isolated and forced to resign.
Charles’s old ally Don Enrique, King of Castile, also died before
taking sides, and his son, Juan I, though heavily pressed by Charles
V to support Clement, preferred to maintain “neutrality,” saying
that, while faithful to the French alliance, he could not go against
the conscience of his subjects. Common people, nobility, clerics,
learned men, he wrote, were all Urbanist. “What government, O
wise prince,” he pointedly inquired of Charles, “has ever succeeded
in triumphing over public conscience supported by reason? What
punishments are available to subjugate a free soul?” During a career
of more than ordinary Spanish confusion, Juan I from time to time
sent out signals of serious thought about the relationship of ruler to

subject. Unfortunately, Charles was already demonstrating that he
could indeed frustrate “public conscience supported by reason.”
Neutrality in the schism, in which Pedro IV of Aragon also tried to
take refuge, was illusory. Political pressures forced both Spanish
Kings and eventually Portugal, too, to opt for Clement.
Urban’s actions after his repudiation grew more savage, irrational,
and uncontrolled than before. He excommunicated Joanna of Naples
for her support of Clement and declared her deposed in favor of one
of her many throne-hungry relatives, Charles of Durazzo. Urban
thereby plunged his papacy into a remorseless conict. He quarreled
with Catherine of Siena over this issue, and when she died of self-
willed privation shortly afterward in 1380, he lost what had been
the warmest voice in his support. He devoted innite devices to the
advancement of a worthless nephew, Francesco Prignano, and when
Charles of Durazzo refused to grant the nephew certain favors,
Urban resorted to arms. On being besieged by Charles of Durazzo,
the Pope mounted four times a day to the battlements to
excommunicate the besiegers. If he had not been mad before, the
cardinals’ challenge had unhinged him now.
Increasingly alienated by his wildness and vindictiveness, two of
Urban’s cardinals defected to Clement, but most felt they had no
choice but to remain with Urban rather than accept a return to
French subjection. Burdened with a crazed Pope, they planned a
kind of regency council to govern for him while holding him in
protective custody, but Urban learned of the plot and arrested the
six cardinals involved. While they were being tortured to extract
confessions of conspiracy, he was reported by an observer to have
walked up and down beneath the windows, reading his breviary in a
loud voice while listening to the cries of the victims. Five were
executed for conspiracy. The sixth, an English cardinal named Adam
Easton, spared through the intervention of Richard II, survived to
testify to what he had witnessed. As the years passed, Urban became
as hated and vilied as his rival. With two such men claiming
leadership of Holy Church, it seemed as if God had good reason to
repent of His house on earth.

Of all the “strange evils and adversities” predicted for the century,
the eect of the schism on the public mind was among the most
damaging. When each Pope excommunicated the followers of the
other, who could be sure of salvation? Every Christian found himself
under penalty of damnation by one or the other Pope, with no way
of being sure that the one he obeyed was the genuine one. People
might be told that the sacraments of their priest were not valid
because he had been ordained by the “other Pope,” or that the holy
oil for baptism was not sanctied because it had been blessed by a
“schismatic” bishop. In disputed regions, double bishops might be
appointed, each holding mass and proclaiming the ritual of the
other a sacrilege. The same religious order in dierent countries
might have divided allegiance, with its monasteries under two
competing priors and its abbeys torn by strife. When, as in Flanders,
political and economic rivalries caused a city to ally itself with the
French under Clement, loyal Urbanists, fearing to live under Anti-
Christ, left their homes, shops, and trades to move to a diocese of
the “true” persuasion.
Though no religious issue had created the schism, once it became
an accomplished fact, partisans were divided by the same hatred as
marked the later religious wars. To Honoré Bonet in France, Urban
appeared as the falling star to whom was given the key to the
“bottomless pit” in St. John’s vision of the Apocalypse. The “smoke
of a great furnace” arising from the pit to darken the sun was the
schism darkening the papacy. The accompanying “locusts and
scorpions” were the “traitorous Romans” who, by terrorizing the
conclave, had forced the false election.
Since papal revenue was cut in half, the nancial eect of the
schism was catastrophic. To keep each papacy from bankruptcy,
simony redoubled, beneces and promotions were sold under
pressure, charges for spiritual dispensations of all kinds were
increased, as were chancery taxes on every document required from
the Curia. Sale of indulgences, seed of the Reformation, became
nancially important. Instead of reform, abuses multiplied, further
undermining faith. When a French bishop or abbot died, according
to the Monk of St. Denis who wrote the Chronicle of the Reign of

Charles VI, the tax-collectors of Avignon descended like vultures to
carry o his goods and furnishings on pretext of making up arrears
in clerical tithes. “Everywhere the service of God was neglected, the
devotion of the faithful diminished, the realm was drained of
money, and ecclesiatics wandered here and there overcome with
misery.”
Legates of each Pope no longer strove for peace between France
and England, but worked openly for one side or another because
each of the principals sought military support to eliminate his rival.
Meanwhile their mutual vituperation and unedifying struggle over
the body of the Church degraded Christendom. The Church was
pulled this way and that, sorrowed the Monk of St. Denis, “like a
prostitute found at the scene of a debauch.” She became “a subject
for satire and object of laughter for all peoples of the world, and
they made up songs about her every day.”
More than anyone else, Charles V was responsible for allowing the
schism to take hold, for Clement would have had no footing without
the support of France. He acknowledged his debt as soon as he
became Pope by a grant to the King of a third of the taxes on the
French clergy. In the end Charles’s choice was to blight all he had
accomplished for the recovery of France. Thinking only of retrieving
a French papacy under French inuence, he had assumed that his
candidate could be imposed. Though surnamed the Wise, he was not
immune from the occupational disease of rulers: overestimation of
their capacity to control events.
No one was a more ardent Clementist than the King’s brother
Anjou, for reasons of his own ambition. The moment the Duke
learned of Clement’s election, he had it proclaimed through the
streets of Toulouse to the accompaniment of mass in the cathedral
and Te Deum sung in all the churches. Speaking of the new Pope as
a “close relative, the issue like myself of the house of France,” he
ordered obedience to the new papacy by Languedoc, sent money to
the cardinals, and envoys to gather support in Florence, Milan, and
Naples. When Clement suered defeat by Urban’s forces and lost
Italy, he applied to Anjou for military support. Anjou’s asking price
was a kingdom.

By agreement between them conrmed in a Bull of April 17,
1379, Anjou was to reconquer the Papal States in Italy and keep the
greater part of them (with the exception of Rome and Naples) for
himself as a Kingdom of Adria, so called from the Adriatic, along
whose shores it was to lie. Bestriding the Apennines, the kingdom
was to include Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, the Romagna, the March
of Ancona, and the duchy of Spoleto. It was to be a ef of the Holy
See paying an annual sum to the papacy of 40,000 francs; every
three years Anjou was to give the Pope a white palfrey in token of
vassalage. The Bull expressly provided that Adria and Naples should
never be united under one ruler. Anjou was to be allowed a delay of
two years to assemble nances and forces, but if within two months
after the two years he had not yet led an expedition into Italy or
sent a “capable general” in his place, the agreement would become
void.
Adria was a kingdom in the clouds. If in all their battles papal
forces had never succeeded in regaining control of the patrimony,
there was no reason to suppose that a French prince would succeed
where they had failed. But overestimation of its powers aected
French policy more and more from this time on; feasibility
restrained it less and less. In the meantime, Anjou’s aid was urgently
needed to maintain Queen Joanna on the throne of Naples,
Clement’s only base in Italy. In order that he have a vested interest
in coming to her defense, Anjou was named—as her distant cousin
—the childless Queen’s heir. By naming the same person as future
King of Naples and putative King of Adria, Clement was arranging
exactly the single rulership he had banned, but perhaps he never
expected Anjou to achieve both. With Naples beckoning, Anjou’s
destiny now lay in Italy, where it would soon draw Coucy with it.
To rally the French public to Clement, once royal policy was
committed to him, required more than mere at. Through April and
May of 1379 a series of public assemblies was held in Paris to
impress upon notables and citizens the invalidity of Urban’s
election. The Cardinal of Limoges, he who had nearly suered
Urban’s blow, came to tell in person all that had happened and
swear with hand on heart, calling on God, angels, and saints as

witnesses to his sincerity, that the cardinals had voted for Urban
“under fear of death.” In contrast, he said, Clement had been chosen
under the right and proper conditions necessary to the election of a
true ponti. Following him, Charles V rose to say that all
conscientious scruples about accepting Clement must now be eased,
for it was clear that a man of such authority and wisdom as the
Cardinal of Limoges would not “damn his soul for love or hate of a
living person.” At further meetings, further cardinals conrmed the
version of duress with solemn oaths.
Formal assent was obtained from an imposing group assembled at
the Château de Vincennes on May 7 in the presence of the King and
Anjou and the Sire de Coucy, among other leading nobles, ministers,
prelates, and masters of theology. After each cardinal in turn was
again asked by the King to declare on his conscience all he knew of
the circumstances, in order to clear all hesitant minds of doubt and
“fortify their faith,” the assembly, with hidden anguish in many
hearts, voted unanimously in favor of the new Pope. A week later
for the benet of the public a great ceremony was held in the plaza
of Notre Dame, where on a platform especially erected for the
occasion the four cardinals supported by the Duc d’Anjou
proclaimed the advent of Clement VII and declared schismatic
anyone who refused obedience.
The University of Paris remained unreconciled. Masters of
Theology, less aected by the compromises of worldly oce, did
not bend so easily as bishops. To them the succession of St. Peter
was a serious matter. Under extreme pressure from the crown, they
formally accepted Clement on May 30, but the acquiescence was
sullen, not unanimous, and a precursor of trouble. Two years later,
after the death of Charles V, all four faculties passed a resolution in
favor of a General Council to put an end to the schism, and appealed
to the crown to summon one. Although authority to convene was
uncertain, fteen such councils had been held so far in the history of
the Church to settle grave issues of doctrine. The University’s appeal
in 1381, presented by a master of theology, Jean Rousse, was
necessarily addressed to the hostile ears of the Duc d’Anjou, then
Regent. As a fearsome example to quiet all such talk, he had Rousse

arrested and imprisoned in the Châtelet. The insult to clergy and
University created a scandal, not appeased when Rousse’s release
was secured only at the cost of an order by Anjou prohibiting any
discussion of a council or a papal election.
Alienated and dismayed, prominent doctors of theology ed to
Rome to join Urban. Others too were leaving. Students and faculty
of Urbanist countries, unable to remain under Clementist obedience,
departed for universities in Italy, the Empire, and Oxford. “The sun
of knowledge” in France, said a departing master, “has suered an
eclipse.” At this time the decline of the University of Paris as a great
cosmopolitan center began.
In England the schism brought Wyclif to the turning point that led
to protestantism. At rst he welcomed Urban as a reformer, but as
the nancial abuses of both Popes grew more agrant, he came to
regard both as Anti-Christs and the schism as the natural end of a
corrupted papacy. Since the moment the Church allowed penance to
be commuted by money, he believed, nothing but evil had been the
result. Despairing of reform from within after the schism, he came
in 1379 to a radical conclusion: since the Church was incapable of
reforming itself, it must be brought under secular supervision. He
now saw the King as God’s Vicar on earth from whom bishops
derived their authority and through whom the state, as guardian of
the Church, could compel reform. Going beyond the abuses of the
Church to attack the theory, Wyclif was now prepared to sweep
away the entire ecclesiastical superstructure—papacy, hierarchy,
orders. Having rejected the divine authority of the Church, it was
now that he came to his rejection of its essence—the power of the
sacraments, specically of the Eucharist.
In a culminating heresy, he transferred salvation from the agency
of the Church to the individual: “For each man that shall be damned
shall be damned by his own guilt, and each man that is saved shall
be saved by his own merit.” Unperceived, here was the start of the
modern world.
When he had preached disendowment of the Church’s temporal
property, Wyclif had had powerful friends, but when he rejected the
sacerdotal system, his patrons, fearing heresy arid the jaws of Hell,

withdrew. In 1381 a council of twelve doctors of the University of
Oxford was to pronounce eight of his theses unorthodox and
fourteen heretical, and to prohibit him from further lecturing or
preaching. Though his voice was silenced, his work spread through
dissemination of the Bible in English. The entire Scripture of some
three quarters of a million words was translated from the Latin by
Wyclif and his Lollard disciples in the dangerous business of
opening a direct pathway to God, bypassing the priest. In the future
erce reaction after the Peasants’ Revolt, when Lollardy was harried
as the brother of subversion, and mere possession of a Bible in
English could convict a man of heresy, the making of multiple
copies of the manuscript Bible was a labor of risk and courage. In
view of 175 copies that still survive and the number that must have
been destroyed during the persecution and lost over the centuries,
many hundreds must have been laboriously and secretively copied
out by hand. Wyclif died in 1384, and the current of protest, as
persecution intensied, ran on underground. When Jan Hus was
burned at the stake for heresy by the Council of Constance in 1415,
Wyclif’s bones were ordered dug up and burned at the same time.
Even riddled by the schism, the Church was still in control. The
cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the
façade holds.
With Europe polarized between two papacies, and the Church
politicized by the rivals’ struggle for secular support, it became
harder to heal the schism each year that it lasted. All thoughtful
men recognized how it was damaging society and tried to nd the
means of reunication, but in the schism, as in the war, vested
hostilities kept the breach open. Ecumenical Council, advocated by
the University of Paris and many individuals, was the obvious
solution. As a challenge to their supremacy, however, both Popes
adamantly rejected it. The hateful rift in Christendom was to last for
forty years. According to a popular saying toward the end of the
century, no one since the beginning of the schism had entered
Paradise.

The fourth, the aged Cardinal Tebaldeschi, had died.

Part Two

Chapter 17

N
Coucy’s Rise
ow “wholly French” once more, Coucy served as the King’s
right arm through the closing eorts of the reign. Though
only 41, Charles V felt time pressing. In February 1378 his
Queen, Jeanne de Bourbon, who was the same age as he,
died of childbed fever after the birth of a daughter, Catherine. Three
weeks later, the last to survive of her previous ve daughters died,
leaving of her eight children only two sons and the newborn to
outlive her. The King “sorrowed long and marvelously” from his
wife’s death “and so did many other good people, for the Queen and
he loved each other as much as loyal married people can.” A month
later came the death—precipitating the schism—of Pope Gregory XI,
with whom Charles had been closely associated, followed in
November by the death of his uncle the Emperor and shortly
afterward by the passing of his longtime ally King Enrique of
Castile. In all these losses Charles cannot but have felt the advancing
shadow of his own limited time, and with it an urgency to leave his
kingdom whole and at peace before he too departed.
To that end he must close the three portals of danger represented
by the persistent betrayals of Charles of Navarre, by the alliance of
the Duke of Brittany with England, and by the continuing war with
England itself. Coucy’s strategic territory, his military and
diplomatic talents, and that evident dependability which Gregory XI
had found notable made him a fulcrum of the King’s eort. His rst
task was to conduct a campaign to eliminate Charles of Navarre
from Normandy once and for all.
On learning that Navarre had again secretly negotiated to re-open
Normandy to the English, Charles V swore to drive his faithless
vassal out of every town and castle he held there. Legality was at
hand in the person of Navarre’s two sons, in whose name the

Navarrese efs in Normandy could be taken over. Since their
mother, the King’s sister, was dead, Charles V could claim their
guardianship by an argument that would admit of no dispute: they
were both in his custody at the court of France at the time. Why
their father allowed this to happen is unclear, unless he intended it
as some devious camouage of his dealings with England.
Legal evidence of Navarre’s treason was provided when his
chamberlain, Jacques de Rue, arrived in Paris with letters for the
two sons. Under interrogation, De Rue testied freely—without
torture, as the King took care to have stated in the authorized
chronicle—that Charles of Navarre planned to poison the King of
France right after Easter through a steward of the royal bakery.
Taking advantage of the ensuing disarray and succession of a minor,
he would then open hostilities by seizing French strongholds along
the Seine while the English landed in Normandy.
This story was easily believable of a prince who had already
attempted the life of his other brother-in-law, the Count of Foix, in a
melodrama infused with all the lurid glitter of the 14th century.
Foix had married the irtatious Agnes, Navarre’s sister, but, as a
man of “impetuous passions,” had not ceased his gallantries, with
the result that Agnes departed in umbrage to take refuge with her
brother. The brothers-in-law were already at odds in a quarrel over
money. When Agnes’ fteen-year-old son, Gaston, came to plead
with her to return, she refused to go unless the request came from
her husband. Charles of Navarre then gave his nephew a bag of
powder to take home, telling him that it would cause his father to
desire the reconciliation, but that he must keep the agent secret or it
would not work. On Gaston’s return to Foix, the bag of powder was
discovered by his bastard brother Yvain, and shown to the Count,
who fed it to one of his dogs, which promptly expired in painful
convulsions.
Restrained from killing his heir and only legitimate son on the
spot, the Count locked him up while all of Gaston’s household who
had gone with him to Navarre were examined and fteen of them
executed. Meanwhile Gaston, realizing that his uncle had conspired
to have him commit parricide, gave way to despair, refusing all

food. On being informed of this situation while he was paring his
nails with a knife, the Count of Foix rushed to his son’s cell, seized
him by the throat saying, “Ha, traitor, why dost thou not eat?” and
accidentally cut him across the jugular with the knife that was still
in his hand. The boy turned on his side without a word and, the
wound proving fatal, died the same day. One more mortal sin was
added to the already overburdened record of Charles of Navarre.
Corroboration of Navarre’s “crimes and treasons” against the King
of France was supplied when codes to his ciphered correspondence
were taken from a second arrested counselor, Pierre du Tertre. All
the collected evidence, and signed confessions by the two
counselors, were made public in their formal trial, conducted with
utmost solemnity before a great assembly of magistrates, clerics,
notaries, merchants, and visitors to Paris. Upon sentence of death,
both counselors were executed. Their headless bodies were hung on
the gibbet and their severed limbs on the four principal gates of
Paris. A public record was thus established to justify Charles of
Navarre’s Norman subjects in transferring their allegiance to his son.
The Normandy campaign was already under way. At the rst
report of Navarre’s treason, the King had assembled an army at
Rouen and “sent hastily for the Sire de Coucy and the Sire de
Rivière,” whom he put in command under the nominal leadership of
the Duke of Burgundy. Fearful of English landings, he instructed
them to conquer Navarre’s towns and castles, especially those
nearest the coast, as speedily as possible either by force or by
negotiation. Bureau de la Rivière, the King’s Chamberlain, with
whom Coucy was to be so closely associated in this campaign and
afterward, belonged to the group of bourgeois-born councillors
derisively called Marmosets by the King’s brothers in reference to
the little stone grotesques that peered from the cornices and pillars
of churches. He was a courteous and gracious ocial, highly
esteemed by Charles V, who had given him controlling power in the
Regency council he had established in case he should die while the
Dauphin was still a minor.
The combination of Coucy and Rivière reected the combined
military and political strategy to be employed. Against walled

towns, siege was slow and costly. For rapid conquest everything
depended on a negotiated surrender, but this could be achieved only
by a credible show of force and in most cases initial combat. To add
to the persuasion of force, Charles of Navarre’s two sons were taken
along “to show to the whole country that the war was in behalf of
these children for their inheritance.”
Bayeux, “a handsome and strong city” at the base of the Cotentin
peninsula where an English landing might be expected (ten miles
from a later landing place renamed Omaha Beach), was the rst
major objective. Bringing up their forces below the walls and
exhibiting the young heir of Navarre as the rightful lord, Coucy and
Rivière warned the citizens “in impressive language” that if the
town were taken by storm “they would all be slaughtered and the
place re-peopled by another set of inhabitants.” The problem in each
case was that the captains of Navarrese garrisons, who might be
charged with treason to their Prince or dishonored if they
surrendered without making a defense, had not the same motive to
yield as the citizens. And since captains generally shut themselves
up in the citadel if besiegers won, thus escaping the slaughter and
plunder visited upon the populace, they preferred to risk a siege
rather than to surrender.
At Bayeux, the garrison was overruled. Inuenced by the rights of
Navarre’s sons and the persuasions of their Bishop, the townspeople
asked for a three-day truce to negotiate terms, always an intricate
business which had to be put in writing with signed and sealed
copies delivered to each side. When this was completed, Coucy and
Rivière entered the city to take possession in the name of the King
of France. After replacing the magistrates with their own appointees
and leaving in place a garrison to prevent rebellion, they moved
forward up the peninsula toward the next stronghold. Successive
towns and castles, bombarded both “by arms and words,” were
taken without much loss of time, although not without active siege
measures, mining of walls, and sharp combats with killed and
wounded on both sides. In the interests of haste, Coucy and Rivière
readily granted favorable terms and allowed determined partisans of
Navarre to depart if they chose to go. Working eectively with

Rivière, Coucy displayed a capacity he shared with the King for cool
pursuit of policy, grafted in Coucy’s case upon a man of action.
Charles of Navarre himself, under attack in the south by the King
of Castile, was not present, and because of contrary winds no more
than a few of his English allies arrived. One group succeeded in
occupying Cherbourg, but was hemmed in there by a French siege.
Elsewhere, Navarrese captains faced a hard choice, because if they
chose to resist they could hope for little help, while if they yielded,
Normandy would be lost to the King of Navarre. Evreux, the heart of
his Norman possessions, manned by his strongest garrison and a
loyal population, gave Coucy and Rivière their hardest ght. “Every
day they made assault,” and so tightly encircled the town that it was
forced to capitulate. The fall of Evreux delighted the King who came
to Rouen to greet the victors who “had so well sped.” Only
Cherbourg, which the English could supply by sea, withstood
prolonged sieges commanded at dierent times by Du Guesclin and
Coucy, and remained in English hands.
With that exception, by the end of 1378 Charles of Navarre had
lost all his estates in Normandy. Walls and fortications were razed
so that his strongholds could not again be held by enemies of
France. In the south, the seigneury of Montpellier, his last
possession in France, was taken from him by the Duc d’Anjou.
Scotched at last after thirtyyears of compulsive plotting, Charles of
Navarre was left to live out a destitute and friendless decade in his
mountain kingdom so much too narrow for his soul. So might Satan
have been penned in a sheepfold.
Famous knights who were to be Coucy’s companions in future
ventures took part in episodes of the Normandy campaign, among
them the late Queen’s brother, the good-tempered if unremarkable
Louis, Duc de Bourbon; also the energetic new Admiral, Jean de
Vienne; and, most notably, one-eyed Olivier de Clisson, who
brought a Breton company to Coucy’s aid at the siege of Evreux.
Whether at this time or some other, these two disparate
personalities joined in the special comradeship of brotherhood-in-

arms, a formal arrangement in which the partners drew up terms of
mutual aid and equal division of prots and ransoms.
Clisson came of a turbulent family embattled on both sides in
Brittany. His father, discovered in dealings with Edward III, had
been beheaded by Philip VI, who had him arrested in the middle of
a tournament, thrown in prison, and conducted almost naked to his
execution without trial. The victim’s wife was said to have carried
her husband’s severed head from Paris to Brittany to display before
her seven-year-old son and exact his oath of vengeance and eternal
hate for France. Then in an open boat, storm-tossed and starving,
they escaped to England, where Edward, who was making every
eort to win the loyalty of the Bretons, showered favor and
properties on the widow and son.
Olivier was brought up at the English court along with the young
Jean de Montfort, his Duke, whose jealousy and dislike he
reciprocated. While he displayed a noble’s haughty manners,
reinforced by an inated opinion of himself, Clisson was called at
one time “the churl” for his coarse language. Pursuing his vowed
revenge, he fought against the French with incredible ferocity at
Reims, Auray, Cocherel, and Najera in Spain. He wielded a two-
handled ax with such force that it was said “no one who received
his blows ever got up again,” although he failed to avert the enemy
ax that cut through his helmet and took out his eye. In the course of
the war in Brittany, Montfort enraged Clisson by favoring Sir John
Chandos, and when he rewarded Chandos with a town and castle,
Clisson denounced the Duke in terrible wrath, assaulted and razed
the castle intended for Chandos, and used the stones to reconstruct
his own.
Charles V had returned to him the lands conscated from his
father and wooed him with gifts, even sending him venison “as to a
friend.” Whether it was these material persuasions or, as Olivier
claimed, the arrogance of the English toward the French that he
could no longer suer, he turned French in 1369 and redirected his
ferocity against his former associates. It reached a peak when he
learned that his squire, wounded and captured by the English, had

been killed as a prisoner on being discovered to belong to Clisson.
Olivier swore a great oath never “by the Mother of God throughout
this year, neither in the morning nor in the evening, to give quarter
to any Englishman.…” The following day, though lacking siege
engines, he attacked an English stronghold with such fury and took
it with such slaughter that no more than fteen defenders were left
alive. After locking them up in a tower room, Olivier ordered them
released one by one, and as each came through the door he struck
o his head with a single blow of a great ax and thus, with fteen
heads rolling at his feet, avenged his squire.
The cool-headed Coucy and the savage Breton must have found a
complement in each other, for these two powerful barons, according
to Clisson’s biographer, “remained always in the most perfect
harmony.” At this time Coucy had just lost in shocking
circumstances his companion from the Swiss campaign, Owen of
Wales. While Coucy was in Normandy, Owen was conducting the
siege of Mortagne on the coast at the mouth of the Gironde. Arising
early on a clear and lovely morning, he sat on a stump in his shirt
and cloak, viewing the castle and countryside, as was his habit,
while having his hair combed by his Welsh squire, James Lambe.
This man had recently been taken into his service as a compatriot
who brought him tidings of his native land and told him “how all
the country of Wales would gladly have him to be their lord.”
Standing behind his master on the still morning before others were
abroad, James Lambe plunged a Spanish dagger into Owen’s body,
“stabbing him clean through so that he fell down stark dead.”
The assassin’s hand was certainly hired by the English, possibly to
remove a focus of agitation on the Welsh border, or, as
contemporaries believed, in reprisal for the miserable death in
prison of the Captal de Buch, originally captured by Owen. If so, it
was a surprisingly dishonorable blow upon an unarmed man, as
recognized by the English captain inside besieged Mortagne to
whom Lambe reported his deed. “He shook his head and beheld him
right felly and said, ‘Ah, thou has murdered him.… But that this
deed is for our prot … we shall have blame thereby rather than
praise.’ ” On the French side, Charles V, though terribly angered, did

not altogether regret the removal of Owen, a freebooter not guiltless
of nefarious deeds of his own. His murder reected a new kind of
animosity growing out of the war. Suborned assassination within the
brotherhood of knights was an innovation of the 14th century.
Halfway through the Normandy campaign Coucy had been sent to
strengthen the defense of the frontier with Flanders, where new
dangers threatened. The Count of Flanders, whose boyhood loyalty
had been so strongly French when he ran away from Isabella, had
long since been brought by economic interests to favor the English.
He appeared as a threat when he gave asylum to the Duke of
Brittany, who had repudiated French vassalage and rejoined the
English. King Charles now decided to rid himself of the problem of
Brittany once and for all by conscating the dukedom from
Montfort on grounds of “felony” toward his sovereign. In the belief
that most Breton nobles were pro-French, he planned to unite the
dukedom with the crown of France under Montfort’s rival Jeanne de
Penthièvre, but instead of suppressing the Breton nest of hornets, he
succeeded only in arousing it.
In December 1378, at a ceremonial Court of Justice with the King
seated in “royal majesty,” Montfort was tried before the peers of the
realm—in absentia, since he ignored the summons. The twelve lay
and twelve ecclesiastical peers of France were an elastic body in
which successive barons of Coucy sometimes gured and sometimes
did not. Froissart specically refers to Enguerrand VII as a “peer of
France,” and on this occasion he was one of four barons seated “on
the eur de lys” along with the peers of royal blood and a
superabundance of eighteen prelates including four “mitred” abbots.
The royal usher, after summoning Montfort aloud three times—at
the entrance to the chamber, at the Marble Table in the courtyard,
and at the gate of the palace—duly reported back that “he is not
there.” The Procurator then read the indictment, citing the Duke’s
treasons, crimes, “injuries and vexations,” including the murder of
the priest sent to summon him. (After the Visconti fashion, Montfort
had the messenger drowned in the river with the summons tied

around his neck.) Following a juridical argument at enormous
length of the rights and claims to the dukedom, Montfort’s title was
declared null, and the King announced Brittany’s union with the
crown.
Charles’s error was at once made clear by a rebellious outburst in
the independent-minded duchy, even among the pro-French party.
The endless quarrel came alive again, and since Montfort was
conniving with the Count of Flanders and both of them with
England, Charles feared the possibility of a new invasion across the
northern frontier. In this situation, the domain of Coucy guarding
the northern gateway came into focus.
In February 1379 the King sent his Treasurer, Jean le Mercier, and
an ocial with the title of Visitor General of Royal Property to
survey the barony of Coucy with instructions “to look and advise
and report the estate of the said seigneur.” In March, after receiving
Mercier’s report, Charles went himself on a week’s tour of Coucy-le-
Château and other castles and towns of the domain. Evidently
ailing, the King watched from his litter the “joyous chase of deer” in
hunts organized in his honor. Whether Enguerrand was present to
welcome his sovereign is nowhere recorded, and the absence of
mention suggests he may have been in the north assembling forces
for defense, or in Normandy at the siege of Cherbourg.
The King was, however, accompanied by the court poet Eustache
Deschamps, who immediately produced a ballade extolling the
marvels of the barony. A master of the verbal acrobatics of the
French verse of his time, yet a realist and satirist at heart,
Deschamps described himself as the “King of Ugliness” with the skin
of a boar and the face of a monkey. He had entered royal service
from humble birth as a simple messenger, advancing to usher-at-
arms, baili, and châtelain of royal properties and, in the next reign,
Steward of Water and Forests and ultimately Général des nances.
Ready to turn out poetry for any occasion—a total of 1,675 ballades,
661 rondeaux, 80 virelais, 14 lays, and miscellaneous pieces—he
now described in verse the “strongholds for men of valor” in Coucy’s
many castles of St. Gobain, St. Lambert and La Fère, the parks of

Folembray, the lovely manor St. Aubin, the falcons’ chase of herons,
the famous donjon:
Who would know a land of great delight
Where lies the heart of the realm of France,
With fortress strong of marvelous might,
Tall forests and lakes of sweet plaisance,
Songs of birds, parks orderly as a dance,
Must to Coucy turn his steps.
There he will nd the nonpareille
Whence comes the cry, “Coucy à la merveille!”
It has been surmised that Charles had in mind the eventual
purchase of Coucy, placing the crown in control of the greatest
stronghold of the north. Purchase of great efs was not
unprecedented; Coucy himself had thus indirectly acquired Soissons.
Yet how he might have been adequately compensated for so great
an estate or why he would be expected to comply with the King’s
desire remains obscure. The fact that he had no son and only a
single female heir, the other being irrevocably English, may have
been a consideration.
The marriage of Marie, sole heiress to the barony, was then being
negotiated. At thirteen she was one of three candidates, along with
Yolande de Bar, a niece of the King, and Catherine of Geneva, a
sister of Pope Clement, who were prospects for the recently
widowed son of the King of Aragon. Such places were not left empty
for long. Eight days after the death of his wife, the Spanish prince
dispatched envoys to Coucy, to the Duc d’Anjou as Yolande’s uncle,
and to the Count of Geneva, with instructions to arrange matters as
soon as possible with any one of the three. When Yolande was
chosen, Marie afterward married Yolande’s brother Henri de Bar,
eldest son of the Duc de Bar and of Marie de France, sister of
Charles V. Alliance with the heir to a great duchy on the borders of
Lorraine maintained the high level of the Coucys’ marital
connections.

Whether Enguerrand was inuenced by this new royal connection
or by pride in his success in Normandy, he created at this time his
own Order of Chivalry called, in the grand manner of the Coucys,
the Order of the Crown. As indicated by Deschamps, who celebrated
the order in a poem, the Crown was meant to symbolize not only
grandeur and power but the dignity, virtue, and high conduct that
surround a king. The points of its circle were the “twelve owers of
authority”: Faith, Virtue, Moderation, Love of God, Prudence, Truth,
Honor, Strength, Mercy, Charity, Loyalty, and Largesse “shining on
all below.” After 1379, Coucy’s seals display a patterned background
of tiny crowns and a standing gure holding a crown—with some
now uncertain signicance—upside down. However elevated in
name, the Order was democratic in spirit: it admitted ladies,
demoiselles, and squires to membership.
In 1379 Isabella de Coucy died in England leaving Enguerrand
free to remarry. Less precipitate than the Prince of Aragon, or too
occupied in urgent aairs, he did not ll her place for seven years.
Nothing came of the King’s visit to his barony at the time, but the
crown’s interest remained active.
A new reign in England brought the English no better fortunes in
the war. The easy mastery of the Channel that Edward III had once
enjoyed was lost, thanks to Charles’s steady alliance with the sea
power of Castile and his own program of shipbuilding. When a force
led bythe Duke of Lancaster nally succeeded in landing near St.
Malo in Brittany, the situation of Cherbourg was reversed. Held by
the French, St. Malo deed siege and wore out the Duke until he
went home in a cloud of failure. “And the commons of England
began to murmur against the noblemen, saying how they had done
all that season but little good.” Unsuccessful war stimulated more
than murmur. While Lancaster was bogged down in Brittany,
English merchant ships were harassed and captured with impunity
by French and Scottish pirates. When the merchants complained, the
nobles and prelates of the King’s Council replied only that defensive
action was up to Lancaster and his eet.

At this, a rich alderman and future Mayor of London, John
Philpot, Master of the Grocers’ Company, assembled a private force
of ships with a thousand sailors and men-at-arms and went forth to
battle the pirates, several of whom he captured together with their
prize ships. When, after a triumphant welcome in London, he was
summoned by the Council to answer for acting without the King’s
leave, his hot reply summed up the growing exasperation of the
Third Estate with the less than adequate performance by the Second.
He had spent his money and risked his men, Philpot said, not to
shame the nobles or win knightly fame, but “in pity for the misery
of the people and country which, from being a noble realm and
dominion over other nations, has through your supineness been
exposed to the ravages of the vilest race. Since you would not lift a
hand in its defense, I exposed myself and my property for the safety
and deliverance of our country.” Even if Philpot and his fellow
merchants were primarily concerned with the safety and deliverance
of their trade, his complaint of the country’s defenders was none the
less valid.
With ill-success on both sides in the war, both desired peace.
Reopening of hostilities in Brittany had counterbalanced for France
her success in Normandy, and the schism raised the temperature of
hostility everywhere. Aware of failing health, Charles V did not
want to leave the quarrels with Brittany and England a burden upon
his son. The parleys after King Edward’s passing had closed without
result and evidently in bad feeling. To avoid mutually irritating
debates, it was proposed to convene separately the next time: the
English at Calais and the French twenty miles away at St. Omer,
with the Archbishop of Rouen acting as go-between. Postponed by
the schism, this plan was adopted for a renewed eort in September
1379.
Coucy, Rivière, and Mercier with one or two others were the
French plenipotentiaries at this parley, and they were also delegated
to meet with the Count of Flanders at Arras in the hope of inducing
him to mediate a settlement with the Duke of Brittany. Before they
could accomplish anything, the Count was caught up by a local

revolt that, surmounting every repression and involving every
faction, was to plunge Flanders into ruinous civil war.
The rising of the men of Ghent had no connection with the
workers’ insurrection that had seized control of Florence in the
previous year. Although separate and spontaneous, the events in the
two cloth cities initiated a whirlwind of class war over the next ve
years arising both from the accumulated miseries of the working
class and from a new strength resulting from the disruptions of the
Black Death. In Florence, Flanders, Languedoc, Paris, England, and
back to Flanders and northern France, insurrections succeeded each
other without visible link, except in the last phase. Some were
urban, some rural; some arose from desperation, some from
strength; but all were precipitated by one factor: oppressive taxes.
At Ghent, where the weavers were in greatest strength, the Count
invited trouble when he levied a tax on the city to pay for a
tournament. Led by the cry of an angry tradesman that tax money
must not be squandered “on the follies of princes and the upkeep of
actors and buoons,” the citizens refused to pay. The Count, playing
on the commercial rivalry of the cities, secured the support of
Bruges by a promise to build a canal connecting it to the sea, to the
advantage of its commerce and the detriment of Ghent. When 500
diggers began work on a channel to divert the river Lys, Ghent
dispatched its militia to the attack, and from that point on, the
conict enlarged itself like a cell dividing. Of Flanders’ erce
tribulations that now began, Froissart wrote, “What shall they say
that readeth this or heareth it read, but that it was the work of the
Devil?”
At the opposite end of France at the same time, revolt erupted in
Languedoc, where famine, oppression, war, and taxes had left a trail
of misery under the harsh rule of the Duc d’Anjou. Impatient, bold,
and habitually forcing events, Anjou exercised virtually sovereign
power over a region amounting to a quarter of the realm. He
swallowed its revenues whole, without distinguishing what was
applied to his personal use from what was applied to the defense of
Languedoc or the kingdom. To make up for fewer hearths as a result
of the plague, the tax per hearth was raised each year, but the

people obtained no benet in better defense. Bandit companies still
penetrated their valleys, still forced their villages to buy respite
from pillage. In 1378, food taxes on consumption were added to
those on sales, falling most heavily on the poor. When tax-collectors
began the practice of house searches, like agents of the Inquisition,
outrage was piled on misery.
“How can we live like this?” protesting groups cried as they
gathered before the Virgin’s statue to implore her aid. “How can we
feed ourselves and our children when already we cannot pay the
heavy taxes laid on us by the rich for their own comfort?” Riots and
disorders spread and reached revolt in July 1379 when Anjou’s
Council levied a heavy new tax of twelve francs per hearth without
convoking the Estates, merely asking the assent of the municipal
councils. The Duke himself was absent at the time, conducting the
war in Brittany. The wrath of his overburdened subjects burst with
extraordinary violence against all in authority: royal ocials,
nobles, and the upper bourgeois of the town councils, whom the
common people held responsible for the new tax. “Kill, kill all the
rich!” was the cry, as reported by a seigneur of Clermont afterward.
“Seigneurs and other good men of the country and towns,” he said,
“went in great fear of death” and in that other fear inspired by all
revolts, “that if this infamous insolence of the common people was
not rigorously suppressed, worse would follow.”
At Le Puy, Nîmes, Clermont, and other towns, the people formed
armed mobs, looted rich households, murdered ocials, and
committed acts of savagery—even, it was reported, “cut open bodies
with their knives and ate like animals the esh of baptized men.” In
October the commotion reached a climax in Montpellier when ve
of Anjou’s councillors were killed and eighty others reportedly
massacred. The insurgents sent out emissaries in an eort to raise a
general revolt, but lacking the solid industrial base and traditions of
the Flemish struggle, the rising quickly ared and was soon
suppressed. Clement VII, dependent on Anjou’s control of Languedoc
for his support, instantly sent Cardinal Albano, a native of
Languedoc, to calm the people and warn them of the terrible

punishment for lèse-majesté. Already afraid of their rebellion, the
leaders were persuaded to submit to the King’s mercy.
The fate of Montpellier was deliberately dramatized for punitive
eect. On the day of the return of the Duc d’Anjou in January, a
vast procession of citizens over the age of fourteen was led through
the city gate by the Cardinal, along with surviving ocials,
ecclesiastics, monks, faculty, and students of the university. Lined
up on both sides of the road, they fell on their knees crying
“Mercy!” as the Duke and his men in armor rode by. Along the way
were stationed magistrates in gowns of oce without mantles, hats,
or belts, women in unadorned dress, citizens with halters around
their necks, and, nally, all the children under fourteen, each group
falling to its knees in turn to cry “Mercy!” The keys to the city’s
gates and the knocker of the great bell were humbly submitted.
During the next two days, at Anjou’s command, all arms were
surrendered and the chief buildings turned over to his men-at-arms.
Then from a platform erected in the main square the Duke
announced the ferocious sentence: 600 individuals condemned to
death—one third to be hung, one third beheaded, one third burned,
all their property to be conscated, and their children sentenced to
perpetual servitude. One half the property of all other citizens was
to be conscated and a ne levied of 6,000 francs plus the cost of
the Duke’s expenses caused by the outbreak. The walls and gates of
the city were to be razed, the university to lose all its rights,
properties, and archives.
A great outcry greeted the sentence, the Cardinal and prelates
pleaded “very lovingly” for pity on the people, the university wept,
women and children knelt and wailed. On the following day a
reduced sentence was announced, remitting most of the penalties.
The whole performance had been for eect. A letter of Charles V to
the Cardinal, dated two months earlier, had stated his intention to
be merciful, but the power of the crown to punish required
demonstration.
The events in Languedoc had one far-reaching result: in exhibiting
the distress of his subjects, they left the King with a guilty
conscience, which could have serious consequences at a medieval

deathbed. For the time being, conscious of the avarice and
oppressions of his brother and the unpopularity they reected on
the crown, Charles reduced the hearth tax and recalled Anjou as
Governor of Languedoc. Unhappily, his replacement, after an
interim under Du Guesclin, was the Duc de Berry, whose rule of
pure acquisitiveness undiluted by any political sense proved, if
anything, more rapacious than his brother’s.
In April 1379, Coucy and Rivière with several new colleagues
went once more in quest of peace to a parley at Boulogne. They
were empowered to make new concessions of territory and
sovereignty and again to oer a marriage, in the person of Charles’s
baby daughter, Catherine, to Richard II. Through six parleys in the
last six years the mirage of peace had mocked its seekers. In the
same period, except for French success in Normandy, continuance of
war had brought no advantage to either side but rather, through
increasing antagonism and suspicion, had made the war harder to
end.
The English came to the parley in divided mind, partly to try what
diplomacy could gain, partly to maintain a holding operation while
they prepared another assault. Montfort’s rebellion had given them
another opportunity to re-enter France and regain the territories
theythought of as theirs. Ever since Charles’s repudiation of the
Treaty of Brétigny and the reverses that followed, they had hated
the French for falsely and wrongfully, as they saw it, dispossessing
them of their property. Defense of their own countrymen might be
lackadaisical, but in combat overseas, where plunder oered, there
was no lack of will to ght, only lack of money. Other means being
exhausted, funds for an expedition to Brittany were raised in 1379
by a graduated poll (or head) tax, a new device designed to cover
clergy and peasants at lower income levels than before. Calculated,
with the usual vagueness about population gures, to bring in
£50,000, it produced only £20,000, all of it invested in a eet
commanded by Sir John Arundel.

Delayed until winter by lack of wind and then by threat of a
French raid, Arundel took part of his force to Southampton to guard
against an enemy landing and, while there, to conduct himself
indistinguishably from the enemy. Besides robbing the countryside,
he quartered his men-at-arms and archers in a convent, allowing
them to violate at will the nuns and a number of poor widows who
lived there, and to carry them o to the ships when ready to sail.
Arundel was the man who had demanded money in hand before he
would defend the south-coast towns against earlier French raids. If
Walsingham may be believed, he used it for ostentation as extreme
as his brutality. He is said to have embarked with a wardrobe of 52
suits embroidered in gold, and horses and equipment to the value of
£7,000.
Sailing in December, his convoy was caught by a violent storm
during which he ordered the kidnapped women thrown overboard
to lighten the ships, maltreated the crew, and having struck down
the pilot, was ttingly wrecked on the rocks of the Irish coast.
Twenty-ve ships with all equipment and all but seven survivors
were lost. Arundel’s body, rolling in the waves, was washed up three
days later. Driven back by the storm, the remainder of the eet
never made the crossing and the tax money was accordingly wasted.
Already in 1378 the Commons had complained of the drain of
money in a war in which they no longer perceived a national
interest. Although war provided business and a living to many
besides the nobles, the Commons protested that it was the King’s
aair and that he had spent £46,000 for the maintenance of Calais,
Cherbourg, Brest, and other places “for which the Commons ought
in no way to be charged.” The government replied that the good-
keeping of these “barbicans” overseas was the safeguard of the
realm, “otherwise we should never nd rest nor peace with our
enemies for then they would push hot war to the thresholds of our
houses which God forbid.” The argument was not likely to persuade
the south-coast towns, which continued to suer hot war pushed to
their thresholds by savage French and Castilian raids. In August
1380 even London was to tremble when an audacious Castilian

force sailed fteen miles up the Thames to sack Gravesend and leave
it in ames.
In answer to the Commons, the Royal Council claimed that the
footholds in France gave the King “convenient gates and entrances
toward his enemies to grieve them when he is ready to act.” It was a
revealing statement of the intentions of the war party headed by the
new King’s youngest uncle, the Earl of Buckingham. A proud, erce,
intolerant young man of 25, he was a late version of the 12th
century Bertrand de Born, who had once so feelingly exhorted his
fellow knights, “Never give up war!”
In March 1380 the English renewed promises of aid to Montfort,
but realization was postponed while the alternatives of peace were
tested at Boulogne. At this parley Coucy and his fellow envoys
oered new cessions and adjustments and the entire county of
Angoulême as dowry for Catherine, but the English remained
suspicious. They believed that the French oer was a ruse to prevent
their coming to Montfort’s aid. But basically, English reluctance to
make peace was simply a desire to go on ghting, now strongly
reinforced by the fact of the schism.
Pope Urban, not yet in his mad stage, was exercising every
pressure to prevent Richard’s marriage to a French princess and
encourage a marriage to Wenceslas’ sister, Anne of Bohemia, which
would weld England and the Empire in an Urbanist axis. When there
was only one Pope, England was anti-papal, but the existence of two
made it necessary to take sides. Richard’s advisers rejected the
French marriage, negotiations were ruptured, and two years later
the King of England married Anne of Bohemia. In the nal irony for
Charles, it was the schism, for which he was responsible, that
frustrated his goal of peace. “All the witte of this worlde,” Langland
wrote in epitaph,
Can nought conforem a pees bytwene the pope and his enymys;
Ne bitwene two Cristene kynges, can no wighte pees make,
Protable to ayther people.

Nor could Charles nd a settlement in Brittany. Coucy and others
were sent on several missions, evidently in search of a formula, and
a Breton Assembly of the Three Estates pleaded movingly for a
pardon of their Duke, but Charles mistrusted Montfort too much to
restore him. Montfort on his part would make no peace with the
sovereign who had conscated his dukedom. For others, particularly
Du Guesclin, the situation was a tangle of conicting loyalties.
Reluctant to ght his Breton compatriots, and subjected to a
whispering campaign by his enemies at court, Du Guesclin left
Brittany to lead a campaign against the Free Companies in
Auvergne. Here, while besieging a castle, he suddenly fell ill and
died in July 1380. While his burial was taking place in the royal
mausoleum at St. Denis with honors “as though he had been the
King’s son,” a new English expedition under Buckingham was
already on its way. With the enemy at hand, and war or unrest in
Brittany and Flanders, France was without a Constable.
At urgent councils held to decide Du Guesclin’s successor, Coucy
and Clisson were the leading candidates. Because of the “great
repute” he had won in Normandy and the “great favor” in which the
King held him, Coucy was oered the appointment, the highest and
most lucrative lay oce of the realm.
As chief military ocer, the Constable outranked the royal
princes; an attack upon his person was considered a crime of lèse-
majesté. He was responsible for cohesion of the armed forces, and
for tactical command when the King did not take the eld. With
control of recruitment, enrollment, provisioning, and all other
arrangements for war, his opportunities for enlarging his fortune
were immense. If the King was not engaged, the Constable’s banner
ew over captured towns; all booty theoretically belonged to him,
except for money and prisoners reserved to the King and for artillery
reserved to the Master of Crossbows. In addition to a xed salary of
2,000 francs a month in peace as in war, he was paid upon the
outbreak of hostilities a sum equal to one day’s pay for every man-
at-arms under contract. Even if this was intended for military
expenses, it oered the recipient considerable scope. And apart from

its prots, the Constableship had become, with the widening of war,
a post of real function.
For reasons that remain enigmatic, Coucy declined the
appointment. The reason he gave the King was that in order to hold
Brittany, the Constable should be someone well known to, and
familiar with, the Bretons—such as Clisson, whose appointment
Coucy advised. His excuse, by itself, seems unconvincing. Clearly
the problem of Brittany was crucial; nevertheless, if a settlement
had to be reached with Montfort, Coucy himself, as Montfort’s
former brother-in-law, was more likely to achieve it than Clisson,
Montfort’s mortal enemy. Coucy and Montfort had both been
married to daughters of Edward III, and though both wives were
dead, the link established a relationship of importance in the Middle
Ages, and in fact determined the choice of Coucy as mediator in the
next reign.
Something is missing from Coucy’s explanation. It is improbable
that, like Dante’s Pope, he made “the grand refusal” from a sense of
inadequacy to the task. Modesty was certainly not a mark of the
Coucys, and Enguerrand VII, judging by his seals and his Order of
the Crown, held himself very highly. He accepted without hesitation
all other assignments—battle, diplomacy, secret missions, foreign
war, domestic governance—that crowded upon him, including the
nal one that was to cost his life. He was one of the nobility forced
by the growing complications of public aairs to become statesmen,
not merely swordsmen on horseback. Coucy’s rank, prowess, and
territorial importance would have warranted military command in
any case, but other qualities were making him indispensable to the
crown. Intelligence, tact, skills of rhetoric, and a noticeable level-
headedness were coming to be more useful than the traditional
mindless impetuosity of the knight in the iron cocoon.
Why then did he refuse the Constableship? The fact that Marshal
Sancerre, to whom it was oered next, likewise refused it suggests
some motive common to both, perhaps connected with the King’s
failing health. Charles V was, in fact, within two months of his
death, and the advancing shadow may have been apparent. With the
Dauphin a minor and the prospect of the King’s three rapacious,

ambitious, and mutually hostile brothers vying for control of the
Regency, the Constableship may have appeared likely to be
politically dangerous for the occupant. Coucy could lose more than
he might gain from it. Unlike Clisson, who was to accept the post,
he avoided making enemies, nor, with his great lands and ancient
ancestry, did he need the oce for power and position.
Upon his refusal, the King appointed him Captain-General of
Picardy and gave him the town, castle, and seigneury of Mortaigne
on the northern frontier between Tournai and Valenciennes to
ensure that this outpost would be held in strong hands. He was also
named to the Regency Council for the Dauphin, on whose account
Charles was increasingly troubled since the death of the Queen.
Owing to the royal Dukes’ resistance to Clisson, the Constableship
was left for the moment unlled.
On the day Coucy took command of Picardy, July 19, 1380, the
Earl of Buckingham landed at Calais and, with a force known from
paymasters’ records to number 5,060, began a march of devastation
and plunder through the region for which Coucy was now
responsible. To raise the cost of the expedition, the English crown
had resorted to a tithe on the clergy and an export tax on wool and
hides, but as the proceeds were not yet in hand, the King had to
pawn the crown jewels for £10,000, which was sucient only for
the start. Thereafter the men-at-arms were to be paid from pillage
en route. Because naval losses had reduced shipping, the
expeditionary force had to cross “little by little,” taking two weeks
for the whole force to complete the one or two days’ sail across the
narrow neck of the Channel to Calais. The much longer sail directly
to Brittany was precluded.
Buckingham’s raid was to prove virtually a replica of Lancaster’s
seven years before—an open-eyed walk into privation, hunger, and
ultimate futility. The strategic objective was to bring support to
Montfort in Brittany and regain England’s footholds there.
Buckingham, however, like Lancaster before him, instead of going
directly toward his objective, took a long way around to the east
through Champagne and Burgundy, in quest of combat and booty.

Since the same tactics brought the same results as before, the
question arises: Why this mad persistence?
Thomas of Buckingham himself is part of the answer. Aggressive
and ruthless by temperament and “wonderfully overbearing” in
manner in the same way as his brother the Black Prince,
Buckingham resented Lancaster’s arrogation of power and saw
himself carrying on the valor and glory of his father and eldest
brother. Englishmen still felt themselves to be living in the
triumphant era of Poitiers and Najera. “The English,” said Clisson
after he left them, “are so proud of themselves and have had so
many good days [at war] that they think they cannot lose.”
England’s most experienced soldier, Sir Robert Knollys, and other
famous knights such as Lord Thomas Percy and Sir Hugh Calveley
accompanied Buckingham to France. What beckoned them and
younger men was personal opportunity for clash of arms, for
reputation and prots, and for whatever punishment they could
inict upon France. For poor knights, squires, and yeomen, war was
livelihood; as Buckingham argued, “They can better live in war than
in peace, for in lying still there is no advantage.” Most knights went
to war to “advance themselves,” as they put it. National strategic
aim was not in their minds, and Brittany hardly more than an
excuse.
With a force half men-at-arms and half archers, the English rode
through Artois and northern Picardy keeping close order in case of
French attack. “They shall have battle before they nish their
march!” Coucy assured French knights who brought him intelligence
of the enemy’s route, although he knew well enough that battle was
enjoined by the King. Charles V was not to be swerved from his
philosophy of war. Not being a ghter himself, he was not
prevented by personal pride from employing the lessons of
experience, nor did he hesitate to hurt the pride of chivalry by
reminders of past defeats. His own initiation into war on the awful
day of Poitiers had left a permanent mark. If a mystique of success
enveloped the English in the conviction that “they could not lose,”
Charles suered from the opposite psychology. From the major
clashes of the early part of the war, he had concluded that the

delivery of armed force could not be reliably directed and that war
was too important to be left to the chances of battle.
From headquarters at Péronne on the Somme, Coucy issued a
general summons to all knights and squires of Artois and Picardy.
The documents show him moving from place to place, at Hesdin,
Arras, Abbeville, and St. Quentin, holding reviews and deploying
units for defense of towns, “for he was anxious that no loss should
be suered from any negligence on his part.” How far Coucy, as a
man of the sword, agreed with the King’s policy is moot; he carried
out orders to avoid battle while following Buckingham’s march,
even when it left a trail of burning villages through his own domain,
but certain actions show that he shared the knights’ impatience to
break through the agony of restraint.
Parties of French knights kept close to the English line of march to
hamper foraging, and this proximity opened tempting opportunities
for combat. Although one report describes the French as immobilis
quasi lapis (immovable as stones), skirmishes were unavoidable,
from which on the whole they did not carry o the honors. In one
case, a erce ght lasting an hour on horse and foot, the English
took eighteen prisoners from a French party of thirty; in another the
French, perceiving the enemy stronger, sounded retreat and ed.
“The horses felt the eect of the spurs and very opportunely did
these lords nd the barriers [of their town] open,” but not before
fteen had been captured. Another party of thirty English, “seeking
to perform some deed of arms,” set forth at dawn with their
foragers, but were meanly frustrated of their main purpose when a
group of important French lords escaped them. “God!” they cried,
“what fortunes would have been ours if we had taken them, for they
would have paid us 40,000 francs.”
When the countryside was stripped, the English demanded food
from the towns under threat of attack. Refused by Reims, secure
behind its walls, they retaliated by burning sixty surrounding
villages within a week. Discovering several thousand sheep herded
into ditches outside the city walls, the English sent men to drive
them out under cover of their archers, who shot so keenly that no
one from Reims dared to venture out or even appear on the

bulwarks. Under renewed threat by the English to burn the elds of
ripe grain, the citizens now delivered to them sixteen loads of bread
and wine.
In this manner Buckingham advanced to Burgundy, where 2,000
French knights and squires had assembled in a mood to throw o
the King’s restraints and ght. The leading nobles of the realm—
Bourbon, Coucy, the Duc de Bar, the Comte d’Eu, Admiral Jean de
Vienne—were present under the command of Philip the Bold, Duke
of Burgundy. Armed head to foot and with battle-ax in his hand, the
Duke in bellicose spirit reviewed his forces. Heralds rode out from
both sides with challenges to deeds of valor. Still the King from his
chamber prohibited battle unless the French found themselves in
decisive superiority. Burgundy did not dare defy his wishes, but the
restraints broke when an English squire was killed in a fracas. In
answer to the enemy’s challenge, a body of knights, including
Coucy, engaged the English in a strenuous ght outside the gates of
Troyes. The outcome was inconclusive, Buckingham moved on, the
French followed, pleading with the King not to let the enemy slip
through their hands. Charles replied only, “Let them alone; they will
destroy themselves.”
At the Loire the French had gathered the advantage in numbers.
Coucy and his companions were determined, “whether the King
willed it or not,” to give battle before the English crossed the Sarthe
into Brittany. Meanwhile Charles, negotiating while the armies
marched, had persuaded the city of Nantes, key to Brittany and pro-
French, not to admit the English and to declare loyalty to France
without reference to Montfort. In the rst week of September the
English crossed the Sarthe and in that week Charles entered his last
illness. The secretion from the abscess on his arm dried up,
heralding death, and physicians and patient accepted the signal.
Moved by litter to his favorite château of Beauté on the Marne,
Charles sent for his brothers and brother-in-law—excepting Anjou,
whom he hoped to keep at a distance from the Royal Treasury—and
prepared to make dispositions for the journey of his soul.
Philip the Bold hastened to Paris, and Coucy likewise because of
his responsibility as a member of the Regency Council. Anjou, who

was kept apprised of events by partisans in Paris, hurried up from
Languedoc, whether wanted or not.
The King suered physically in his last days, but his mental
anguish was heavier. Two things weighed on his conscience: his part
in the schism and the questionable legality of his taxation. He had
stretched temporary grants by the Estates into ten years of
continuous taxes, and though he had used them for defense of the
realm and the “public weal,” he had lled the royal coers in the
process and bought the allegiance of nobles with the people’s tax
money. How would he answer to God? He had raised France from a
“heap of ruins”; he had canceled—except for Calais—the English
conquests made in the time of his father and grandfather; he had
uprooted Navarre permanently from Normandy; and if peace had
receded from his grasp, he had, by the steady pursuit of national
purpose, justied the loyalty of all who had felt themselves French
in the hour of choice.
But had he bought recovery at the price of the people’s misery?
The uprising in Languedoc had revealed the cost, and Charles was
aware, through tax-collectors’ reports, of angry mutterings closer to
home. Oppression of his subjects reacted upon the fate of his soul,
for a sovereign’s illegal taxes could arouse the Divine wrath, and the
complaints of those he had wronged would follow him to the
judgment seat. In his own time the unknown author of the allegory
Songe du Vergier (Dream of the Woodsman) branded as tyrants all
princes who burdened their subjects with “taxes impossible to bear,”
and theologians warned rulers that they should cancel all exactions
and make restitution to great and small if they hoped for salvation.
That hope dictated the King’s last act.
Within hours of death, fully dressed and laid on a chaise-longue
before a perturbed group of prelates, seigneurs, and councillors
representing the three estates, the King in a fading voice spoke rst
of the schism. He insisted in a troubled and rambling defense that
he had sought to follow “in this as in all else, the surest road,” that
“if ever rumor should say that the Cardinals acted under the
inspiration of the Demon, you may be sure that no consideration of
kinship dictated my choice but solely the statements of the said

Cardinals and the advice of prelates, clerics and my councillors”;
nally, that he would obey a decision of a General Council of the
Church and “God could not reproach me if in my ignorance I acted
contrary to a future decision of the Church.” It was the declaration
of a very worried man.
At the door of death in the Middle Ages, the trembling traveler,
more often than not, felt required to repudiate what he had done in
life. When it came to taxes, the most conscientious sovereign of his
time repudiated the exercise of kingship. He announced the terms of
an ordinance to “abate and abolish” the hearth taxes, “as from here
on, and it is our pleasure, wish and order by these same letters, that
they shall no longer be current in our kingdom and that from now
on our said people and subjects shall not pay any of them but shall
be quit and discharged.”
Other, indirect taxes existed, but the hearth tax was the basic
property tax on which the nancial system rested. To decree that it
should “no longer be current” was to deceive the people and deprive
his successors—supposing the decree were to be carried out—of the
means of governing. Charles’s act was not an aberration. Sovereigns
before him had been known to cancel taxes and return subsidies
illegally exacted, and deathbed donors regularly made restitutions
and established foundations that, if carried out, would bankrupt
their families. Charles had amassed a huge fortune for his son, but
by 1380 the theory that the King could live of his own domain was
a ragged ction. A regular nancial footing, as Charles knew all too
well, was government’s greatest need. In the chill of death, his soul’s
need was stronger.
The King received extreme unction, commended to his brothers
his twelve-year-old son, and urged on them with his last breath the
lifting of taxes: “Take them o as speedily as you can.” Bureau de la
Rivière, kneeling in tears at the bedside, embraced the King; the
room was emptied of the sobbing crowd so that his last moments
should be in peace. He died on September 16, 1380, and his last
ordinance was proclaimed the next day. Between public rejoicing
and the conicting sentiments of the late King’s brothers, an
explosive situation was created.

In Brittany in the same month Buckingham received an
ambiguous welcome. Montfort, whose whole life was spent
balancing enemies, intriguing, ghting, quarreling, and making
treaties with everyone, was a habitual double-dealer. Charles being
dead, he was prepared to make peace with the new King, and
opened negotiations with the French while at the same time signing
a compact of many oaths with Buckingham to jointly besiege
Nantes. But the reluctance of Breton nobles to support an attack on
their countrymen decided their lord to choose France. Coucy,
warmly in favor of a reconciliation with Brittany, was one of the
negotiators who concluded a treaty with Montfort in January 1381.
Buckingham, who was not kept informed by his ally, found towns
and castles closed to him and provisions withdrawn inside their
walls. Through the winter months his wasted army wandered from
place to place, often lacking food and shelter. Finally told by
Montfort that he must leave, he and his companions took ship for
England in March 1381. Except for individual knighthoods and
ransoms and some fruits of pillage collected en route, Buckingham
and his fellows had accomplished no military purpose, “to their
great discomfort and the discomfort of the whole English nation.”
Both nations under boy kings now suered the rule of ambitious
and contending uncles who, wearing no crown, exercised power
without responsibility. War receded; internal stress reached the
bursting point.

Chapter 18

L
The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions
et him go to the Devil! He lived long enough,” cried a
workingman on the death of the King. “It would have been
better for us if he had died ten years ago!” Within a few
months of the King’s death, France experienced the explosion
of working-class revolt that had already swept through Florence and
Flanders. In addition to oppressive taxes, a rising rancor of the poor
against the rich and a conscious demand by the lowest class for
greater rights in the system supplied the impulse. Concentration of
wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the
proportion of the poor, while the catastrophes of the century
reduced large numbers to misery and want. The poor had remained
manageable as long as their minimum subsistence could be
maintained by charity, but the situation changed when urban
populations were swelled by the otsam of war and plague and
infused by a new aggressiveness in the plague’s wake.
As the masters became richer, the workers sank to the level of day
labor, with little prospect of advancement. Membership in the guilds
was shut o to the ordinary journeyman and reserved under
complicated requirements and fees for sons and relatives of the
master class. In many trades, work was farmed out to workers in
their homes, often at lower wages to their wives and children,
whose employment was forbidden in the guilds. Obligatory religious
holidays, which numbered 120 to 150 a year, kept earnings down.
Although forbidden to strike and, in some towns, to assemble,
workers formed associations of their own to press for higher wages.
They had their own dues and treasuries and connections across
frontiers through which jobs and lodgings could be secured for
members, and which doubtless served as channels of agitation.

Self-consciousness as a class—the “people”—was growing. Christ
was often portrayed as a man of the people and shown in frescoes
and carvings surrounded by an artisan’s or peasant’s tools—
hammer, knife, ax, and wool-carder’s comb—instead of by the
instruments of the Crucixion. In Florence, the workers called
themselves il popolo di Dio. “Viva il popolo!” was the cry of the revolt
of the Ciompi in 1378. As the greatest industrial center of the day,
Florence was the natural starting place of insurrection.
The Ciompi were the lowest class of workers unaliated with any
guild, but while the revolt came to be called after them, artisans of
all levels and degrees below the major craft guilds were involved in
the rising. They worked at xed wages, often below subsistence
level, for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, and their wages might be
withheld to cover waste or damage to raw materials. The alliance of
the Church with the great was plain enough in a bishop’s pastoral
letter declaring that spinners could be excommunicated for wasting
their wool. Workers could be ogged or imprisoned or suer
removal from the list of employables or have a hand cut o for
resistance to employers. Agitators for the right to organize could be
hung, and in 1345 ten wool-carders had been put to death on this
charge.
In the outbreak of 1378, after a storm of violence throughout the
city, the workers rushed up the steps of the Signoria’s palazzo to
present their demands. They wanted open access to the guilds, the
right to organize their own unions, reform of the system of nes and
punishments, and, most signicantly, the right “to participate in the
government of the City.” In an era without guns or tear gas, mobs
inspired immediate terror. Although the city hall was well supplied
with means of defense, the Signoria were “frightened men,” and
capitulated. The workers installed a new government based on
labor’s representation in the guilds. It lasted 41 days before it began
to crumble under internal stress and the counter-oensives of the
magnates. Reforms gained in the revolt slowly eroded, and by 1382
the major guilds had reasserted their control, if not their condence.
Thereafter the fear of another proletarian outbreak contributed to

the decline of republican government and the rise of the Medici as
the dominant ruling family.
The weavers of Ghent had greater staying power. At Ypres and
Bruges the original revolt had been suppressed by the Count of
Flanders with fearful vengeance of burning and hanging. But the
Gantois, through sieges, truces, treacheries, and brutal retaliations
on both sides, had maintained their war despite blockade and near
starvation. Ghent’s struggle was not in fact class war, though it
came to be perceived as such. Rather it was a stubborn defense of
town autonomy against the Count, crisscrossed by the strife of social
and religious factions. It was a complex of rivalries between towns,
between trades, and among dierent levels within a trade. The
weavers oppressed the lower-class fullers with as much animus as
they directed against the Count.
In France, the King’s deathbed promise of abolition of taxes
aroused a fever of impatience for its fulllment. Anger at taxes
continually levied in the name of ghting the English had reached
outrage when Buckingham raided the countryside unopposed and
the people saw their money go, as it seemed, for nothing. In fact, as
a result of funds spent by Charles V on improved defenses, towns
and castles were better able to withstand the enemy than in the
miserable years after Poitiers. But this did not lessen the burden on
the lowest taxable class nor the resentment of the independent
towns at having to pay for what was considered to be the King’s
business. Such, was this feeling that Laon refused to open its gates
to Coucy as Captain-General of Picardy and refused also to send him
a company of thirty archers he had demanded. The towns of Picardy
balked at further payments. At St. Quentin and Compiègne, crowds
rioted, burned tax oces, assaulted tax-collectors and chased them
out of town.
In Paris, the government was half paralyzed by the scramble for
power around the throne. As eldest uncle, Anjou held the title of
Regent, and used it to seize as much of the Treasury as he could for
the purpose of pursuing the kingdom that beckoned him in Italy.
Aware of his brothers’ predatory habits, the late King had arranged
for the Regency to end when his son was fourteen, but he had died

two years too soon. He had named his brother Burgundy and his
wife’s brother Bourbon as guardians of his son. With Anjou as
Regent, they were to rule with a Council of Twelve. Bourbon, who
had no ambitions and held aloof from cabals, was known as “the
Good Duke” in nice distinction to the paternal uncles, but he had
less inuence than they because he was not of the blood royal.
Pulled apart by their separate interests—Burgundy in Flanders,
Anjou in Italy, Berry in a passion for collecting—the paternal uncles
had no common interest in the integrity of the realm. Their only
cohesion was in desire to remove the hands of the late King’s
ministers from the controls. Meanwhile, amid their discords, they
found time to divide up his magnicent library of a thousand
volumes. Anjou took 32 carefully chosen books with silk and
enameled bindings and golden clasps, among the most beautiful in
the collection, including one entitled The Government of Princes.
Clisson was named Constable and the coronation was hastened to
strengthen the authority of the regime. A disgraceful scene marred
the monarchy’s sacred ceremony on November 4. At the banquet
table, Anjou and Burgundy, who detested each other, engaged in a
physical scramble for the seat of honor next to the new King. Amid
tumult of partisans’ and prelates’ dismay, a Council was hastily
convened which decided in favor of Burgundy as premier peer of
France, whereupon Anjou seized the seat anyway, only to be shoved
out of it by Philip the Bold, who sat down in his place. In this sorry
exhibition, the reign began.
Its sovereign, twelve-year-old Charles VI, was a handsome, well-
built boy, tall and fair like his grandfather, with an inexpressive
face, mirror of a shallow soul. “Shining and polished arms pleased
him more than all the jewels in the world,” and he adored the
rituals of chivalry. These were never more ttingly displayed than at
the coronation banquet when Coucy, Clisson, and Admiral de
Vienne, magnicently mounted on horses caparisoned in cloth of
gold down to the ground, served the King’s dishes from horseback.
To give the King’s entry into Paris the greatest possible éclat, three
days of splendid festivities with music by minstrels were held in
squares hung with tapestries. “New marvels,” in the form of

articial fountains running with milk, wine, and clear water, were
constructed to amaze the people.
They did not suce. The summoning of an Estates General for
November 14 to provide a substitute for the hearth tax intensied
public anxiety at the prospect of a new levy. Excited clusters of
artisans discussed their grievances in the streets, secret meetings
were held at night, assemblies gathered to denounce the
government, the people were “inamed and agitated by an ardent
desire to enjoy liberty and free themselves from the yoke of
subsidies.”
When the Chancellor, Miles de Dormans, Bishop of Beauvais,
informed the Estates that the King needed aids from the people, the
predictable explosion came. A crowd of commoners rushed upon a
meeting of merchants, who, though opposed to the aids, were not
prepared to force the issue.
“Know, citizens, how you are despised!” cried a cobbler in
passionate oratory to his followers. All the bitterness of the little
against the great was expressed in his denunciation of the “endless
greed of seigneurs” who “would take from you, if they could, even
your share of daylight.” They crush the people with their exactions,
more each year. “They do not wish us to breathe or to speak or to
have human faces or mix with them in public places.… These men
to whom we render forced homage and who feed on our substance
have no other thought but to glitter with gold and jewels, to build
superb palaces and invent new taxes to oppress the city.” He poured
scorn on the cowardice of the merchants, citing in comparison the
stalwart citizens of Ghent who at that very moment were in arms
against their Count because of taxes.
If the cobbler’s eloquence was owed in part to embellishment by
the Monk of St. Denis, who recorded it, that only serves to indicate
the sympathy of many monastic chroniclers with the plight of the
people. In his famous prophecy, the friar Jean de Roquetaillade had
seen the day coming when “the worms of the earth will most cruelly
devour the lions, leopards and wolves … and the little and common
folk will destroy all tyrants and traitors.”

For the cobbler and his 300 companions, that day was at hand.
Screaming and brandishing knives, they forced the Provost of
Merchants to carry their demand for tax abolition to Anjou and the
Chancellor. At the Marble Table in the palace courtyard, the Provost
pleaded for a lifting of the “intolerable burden.” With “terrible
shouts” the crowd conrmed his words, swearing they would pay no
more but die a thousand times rather than suer “such dishonor and
shame.” These unexpected words appear frequently in the protests,
as if to add the dignity of knightly formula. The poor no less than
the great needed to feel themselves acting nobly.
Anjou, in smooth and soothing words of pity for the poor,
promised to obtain by the next day the King’s assent to abolition of
taxes. During the night the people listened to dangerous counsels
about challenging the sovereignty of nobles and churchmen. They
believed, according to the chronicler of St. Denis, “that the
government would be better directed by them than by their natural
lords.” Whether this revolutionary sentiment was in fact in the
minds of the people or only feared to be by the chronicler, it was
certainly in the air.
When the frightened government conrmed abolition next day,
the relief was all too quick. In a frenzy of triumph and unspent
wrath, the people rushed to rob and assault the Jews, the one
section of society upon whom the poor could safely vent their
aggression. The assault was instigated, it was said, by certain nobles
in the crowd who saw a way of wiping out their debts. While some
of the crowd raced through the city to seize tax coers and destroy
the registers, the main body, with nobles participating, rampaged
through the Jewish quarter to cries of “Noël! Noël!” (referring to the
birthday of Christ). They broke down doors, looted goods and
documents, carried o valuables, pursued Jews through the streets
to throw those they could catch into the river, and seized numbers
of children for forced baptism. Most of the Jews ed for refuge to
the dungeons of the Châtelet, but ten bodies, including a rabbi’s,
were recovered after the carnage. The pogroms spread to Chartres,
Senlis, and other cities. As the symptom of a disturbed society, the
persecutions continued o and on over the next decade until the

crown was forced to decree yet another expulsion of the Jews in
1394.
For the moment, the crown’s need of money dictated an eort
through Hugues Aubriot, Provost of Paris, to take the Jews under
royal protection. Aubriot, a contentious gure and notorious
libertine, sent out heralds ordering restoration of everything stolen
from the Jews including the kidnapped children. “Very few obeyed
the order,” and the Provost’s snatching of souls from Christian
baptism was to be a charge against him in his coming downfall.
By edict of November 16, the government, as promised, abolished
“henceforth and forever all taxes, tithes, gabelles, by which our
subjects are much grieved, quitting and remitting all aids and
subsidies which have been imposed for the said wars since our
predecessor, King Philip, until today.” This stroke of scal suicide
reected momentary panic rather than serious intention. Aside from
Charles V, most rulers governed by impulse in the 14th century.
In search of other money, the government immediately appealed
to the provincial Estates for voluntary aids, with generally meager
results. At the Estates of Normandy, when one member proposed to
vote a grant, the assembly cried with one voice, “Nothing!
Nothing!” At Rouen and Amiens, the people “were all of one will”
against it. “By God’s blood, it shall never pass!” shouted a bourgeois
orator to a protest meeting in the pig market of Sens. Opinion was
general that the King’s treasure was enough for his needs and that
more money would only go into greater extravagances by the
nobles. While some districts voted aids, the major result of
summoning the provincial Estates was to spread discussion and
excite resistance.
Divided interests in the Third Estate complicated the struggle. The
petty bourgeois were seeking to wrest control from the ruling
oligarchy of merchants and masters of guilds, and both parties used
the rising agitation of the working class for their own ends. They
had inammable tinder in the unhappy ranks of the unskilled and in
dispossessed peasants, driven into the cities by the wars, who
created a reservoir of anger and misery.

The late King’s ministerial structure, like the nancial, was soon
riddled by the uncles’ eorts to remove his councillors. Bureau de la
Rivière, whom Charles V had loved and wished to have buried at his
feet, was accused of treason by a spokesman of the Dukes but was
saved when Clisson threw down his glove in the presence of the
whole court and no one dared take up the awful challenge. In fear
of reprisals, Rivière afterward left oce, d’Orgement and Mercier
were eventually pushed out, and another of the former councillors,
Jean de La Grange, Cardinal of Amiens, found good reason to
depart.
La Grange was disliked by the young King, who had been led by
the Cardinal’s enemies to believe that he kept a familiar demon. On
one occasion when Charles was ten, he had crossed himself at the
Cardinal’s approach, crying, “Flee from the Devil! Throw out the
Devil!”—to the considerable annoyance of that prince of the Church.
On learning that the young King, on his accession, had said to a
friend, “This is the moment to revenge ourselves on this priest,”
Cardinal La Grange put his treasure in safekeeping and ed to
Avignon, never to return.
The sensational fall of the Provost of Paris added to the sense of
crumbling authority. Hugues Aubriot was a man in his sixties who
had won the favor of Philip of Burgundy by extravagant banquets
and gifts, and the favor of the bourgeois by construction of the rst
sewers and by vigorous repair of walls and bridges. But he was
marked for destruction by the clergy, whom he openly insulted, and
by the University, which he scorned as that “nursery of priests” and
whose privileges he combatted and members he arrested on any
pretext. It was said that he reserved two dungeons in the Châtelet
expressly for scholars and clerics. At the funeral of Charles V, when
Aubriot refused to allow the University to take precedence in the
procession, a furious fracas broke out between the Provost’s
sergeants and the scholars, ending with many of the University
wounded and 36 thrown in jail. “Ha, that rabble!” Aubriot
exclaimed. “I am sorry that nothing worse happened to them.”
Aubriot’s intervention in the case of the Jews gave the University
its handle for revenge. Accused of heresy, sodomy, and being a false

Christian, and, specically, of “profaning the sanctity of baptism” by
returning the Jewish children, he was brought to trial before the
Bishop of Paris in May 1381. Besides charges of voicing contempt
for the Eucharist, failure to take communion at Easter, and public
disrespect of the clergy, he was accused of neglect of a virtuous
wife, of buying virgins, and having “recourse to sorcery that his
passions might triumph,” of imprisoning husbands to have freedom
with their wives, of cohabiting bestially with women against nature
and having carnal relations with Jews.
Convicted, but spared a death sentence by Burgundy’s inuence,
he was exposed on a wooden platform in front of the cathedral,
where, on his knees and hatless, he was obliged to beg for
absolution and vow an oering of candles for the baptized Jews he
had returned to their parents. Absolved by the Bishop and Rector of
the University, he was then condemned to perpetual penitence in
prison on bread and water. His removal, contributing to the
weakening of government, left the people of Paris readier to rise.
Coucy during these uneasy happenings remained in the Royal
Council on good terms with the Dukes, each of whom desired his
support. One of Anjou’s rst acts as Regent, on September 27, had
been to conrm Coucy in lifetime possession of Mortaigne on the
Channel, bestowed on him by the late King. In addition to grand
estate, Coucy clearly possessed a personal power of attraction and a
faculty for not making enemies. In the great game of “who’s in,
who’s out,” he was always able to work with whoever held power,
perhaps owing to political sophistication gained from the
circumstances of his marriage. After accomplishing the treaty of
peace with the Duke of Brittany in January 1381, he was sent once
more as ambassador to the English at Montreuil to negotiate a
dispute over terms of the truce. Later in the year, documents show
him paying spies for information on Calais, Guînes, and other
English fortresses. While charged with defense of the frontier, he
was recalled to Paris in May to advise Anjou on his projects in Italy.
Spoiling for a kingdom, Anjou needed money. Informed of the
treasure stored by Charles V at Melun for the use of his son, Anjou
laid hold of it by the direct expedient of threatening to execute the

guardian of the fund. The Monk of St. Denis, however, does not
vouch for this story because “one never knows the truth about these
things that take place in the shadow.” Whatever Anjou obtained, it
was not enough. He continued pressing for aids through 1381,
winning a few grants here and there, but generally meeting sullen
resistance.
While France smoldered, true revolt erupted in June 1381 in
England, not of the urban class but of the peasants. In a country
whose economy was largely rural, they were the working class that
mattered. The third poll tax in four years, to include everyone over
the age of fteen, was the precipitant. Voted in November 1380 by a
subservient Parliament to nance Lancaster’s ambitions in Spain,
the collection brought in only two thirds of the expected sum, not
least because tax commissioners were easily bribed to overlook
families or falsify their numbers. A second round of collecting
became necessary, which could have been foreseen as an invitation
to trouble if the lords and prelates and royal uncles of Richard’s
government had paid attention to the constant complaints of rural
insubordination. They did not, and brought upon themselves the
most fearful challenge of the century.
At the end of May, villages in Essex on the east coast just above
London refused payment; the resistance spread with some evidence
of planning, and burst into violence in Kent, the adjoining county
south of the Thames. Peasants mingled with yeomen from the
French wars armed themselves with rusty swords, scythes, axes, and
longbows blackened by age, and triumphantly stormed a castle
where a runaway villein had been imprisoned. Electing Wat Tyler,
an eloquent demagogue and veteran of the wars, as their
commander-in-chief, they seized Canterbury, forced the mayor to
swear fealty to “King Richard and the Commons,” and liberated
from the Archbishop’s prison the idealogue of the movement, John
Ball. He was a vagrant priest, scholar, and zealot who had been
wandering the country for twenty years, frequently hauled in by the

authorities for prophesying against Church and state and preaching
radical doctrines of equality.
Although the poll tax was the igniting spark, the fundamental
grievance was the bonds of villeinage and the lack of legal and
political rights. Villeins could not plead in court against their lord,
no one spoke for them in Parliament, they were bound by duties of
servitude which they had no way to break except by forcibly
obtaining a change of the rules. That was the object of the
insurrection, and of the march on the capital that began from
Canterbury.
As the Kentishmen swept forward to London, covering the seventy
miles in two days, the Essex rebels marched southward to meet
them. Abbeys and monasteries on the way were a special object of
animosity because they were the last to allow commutation of
servile labor. In the towns, artisans and small tradesmen, sharing
the quarrel of the little against the great, gave aid and food to the
peasants. As the sound of the rising spread to other counties, riots
and outbreaks widened.
The “mad multitude” on its march from Kent and Essex opened
prisons, sacked manors, and burned records. Some personally hated
landlords and ocials were murdered and their heads carried
around on poles. Others, in fear of death, ed to hide in the same
woods where villein outlaws frequently hid from them. Certain lords
were forced by the rebels to accompany them “whether they would
or not,” either to supply needed elements of command or the
appearance of participation by the gentry.
At the same time, peasant spokesmen swore to kill “all lawyers
and servants of the King they could nd.” Short of the King, their
imagined champion, all ocialdom was their foe—sheris,
foresters, tax-collectors, judges, abbots, lords, bishops, and dukes—
but most especially men of the law because the law was the villeins’
prison. Not accidentally, the Chief Justice of England, Sir John
Cavendish, was among their rst victims, along with many clerks
and jurors. Every attorney’s house on the line of march reportedly
was destroyed.

If the Jacquerie 23 years earlier had been an explosion without a
program, the Peasants’ Revolt arose out of a developing idea of
freedom. Though theoretically free, villeins wanted abolition of the
old bonds, the right to commute services to rent, a riddance of all
the restrictions heaped up by the Statute of Laborers over the past
thirty years in the eort to clamp labor in place. They had listened
to Lollard priests, and to secular preachers moved by the evils of the
time, and to John Ball’s theories of leveling. “Matters cannot go well
in England,” was his theme, “until all things shall be held in
common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords, when the
lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.… Are we not all
descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?”
Wyclif’s spirit, which had dared deny the most pervasive
authority of the time, was abroad. What had happened in the last
thirty years, as a result of plague, war, oppression, and
incompetence, was a weakened acceptance of the system, a mistrust
of government and governors, lay and ecclesiastical, an awakening
sense that authority could be challenged—that change was in fact
possible. Moral authority can be no stronger than its
acknowledgment. When ocials were venal—as even the poor
could see they were in the bribing of tax commissioners—and
warriors a curse and the Church oppressive, the push for change
gained strength.
It was encouraged by the preachers’ castigation of the powerful.
“The tournaments of the rich,” they said, “are the torments of the
poor.” They regularly denounced “evil princes,” “false executors
who increase the sorrows of widows,” “wicked ecclesiastics who
show the worst example to the people,” and, above all, nobles who
empty the purses of the poor by their extravagance, and disdain
them for “lowness of blod or foulenesse of body,” for deformed
shape of body or limb, for dullness of wit and uncunning of craft,
and deign not to speak to them, and who are themselves stued
with pride—of ancestry, fortune, gentility, possessions, power,
comeliness, strength, children, treasure—“prowde in lokynge,
prowde in spekyng,… prowde in goinge, standynge and sytting.” All
would be drawn by ends to Hell on the Day of Judgment.

On that day of wrath, said the Dominican John Bromyard in terms
that spoke directly to the peasant, the rich would have hung around
their necks the oxen and sheep and beasts of the eld that they had
seized without paying for. The “righteous poor,” promised a
Franciscan friar, “will stand up against the cruel rich at the Day of
Judgment and will accuse them of their works and severity on earth.
‘Ha, ha!’ will say the others, horribly frightened, ‘These are the folk
formerly in contempt. See how they are honored—they are among
the sons of God! What are riches and pomp to us now who are
abased?’ ”
If the meek were indeed the sons of God (even if they too were
scolded by the preachers for greed, cheating, and irreverence), why
should they wait for their rights until the Day of Judgment? If all
men had a common origin in Adam and Eve, how should some be
held in hereditary servitude? If all were equalized by death, as the
medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that
inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
At its climax on the outskirts of London, the Peasants’ Revolt
came to the edge of overpowering the government. No measures
had been taken against the oncoming horde, partly from contempt
for all Wills and Cobbs and Jacks and black-nailed louts, partly from
mediocre leadership and lack of ready resources. Lancaster was
away on the Scottish border, Buckingham was in Wales, and the
only organized armed forces were already embarking at Plymouth
for Spain under the command of the third brother, Edmund of
Cambridge. Except for 500 or 600 men-at-arms in the King’s retinue,
the crown controlled no police or militia; London’s citizens were
unreliable because many were in sympathy and some in active
connivance with the rebels.
Twenty thousand peasants were camped outside the walls
demanding parley with the King. While they promised him safety,
they shouted for the heads of Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert
Hailes, the Chancellor and Treasurer, whom they held responsible
for the poll tax, and for the head, too, of the arch “traitor,” John of

Gaunt, symbol of misgovernment and a failing war. John Ball
harangued them with a erce call to cast o the yoke they had
borne for so long, to exterminate all great lords, judges, and lawyers
and gain for all men equal freedom, rank, and power.
In agitated council, the government could nd no course but to
negotiate. Richard II, a slight fair boy of fourteen, accompanied by
his knights, rode out to meet the insurgents and hear their demands:
abolition of the poll tax and of all bonds of servile status,
commutation at a rate of four pence an acre, free use of forests,
abolition of the game laws—all these to be conrmed in charters
sealed by the King. Everything the rebels asked was conceded in the
hope of getting them to disperse and go home.
Meanwhile, partisans had opened the city’s gates and bridges to a
group led by Wat Tyler, who gained possession of the Tower of
London and murdered Archbishop Sudbury and Sir Robert Hailes.
Balked of Gaunt, they ung themselves upon his palace of the Savoy
and tore it apart in an orgy of burning and smashing. At Wat Tyler’s
order, it was to be not looted but destroyed. Barrels of gunpowder
found in storage were thrown on the ames, tapestries ripped,
precious jewels pounded to bits with ax heads. The Temple, center
of the law with all its deeds and records, was similarly destroyed.
Killing followed; Lombards and Flemings (hated simply as
foreigners), magnates, ocials, and designated “traitors” (such as
the rich merchant Sir Richard Lyons, who had been impeached by
the Good Parliament and restored by Lancaster) were hunted down
and slain.
In the hectic sequence of events, only Richard moved in a magic
circle of reverence for the King’s person. Perched on a tall war-horse
before the peasants, a charming boy robed in purple embroidered
with the royal leopards, wearing a crown and carrying a gold rod,
gracious and smiling and gaining condence from his sway over the
mob, he granted charters written out and distributed by thirty clerks
on the spot. On this basis, many groups of peasants departed,
believing in the King as their protector.
While in London, Sir Robert Knollys, the Master of War, was
urgently assembling an armed force, Wat Tyler, inamed by blood

and conquest, was exhorting his followers toward a massacre of the
ruling class and a takeover of London. He was no longer to be
satised by the promised charters, which he suspected were hollow,
and he knew he would never be included in any pardon. He could
only go forward toward a seizure of power. According to
Walsingham, he boasted that “in four days’ time all the laws of
England would be issuing from his mouth.”
He returned to the camp at Smitheld for another meeting with
the King, where he put forth a new set of demands so extreme as to
suggest that their purpose was to provoke rejection and provide a
pretext for seizing Richard in person: all inequalities of rank and
status were to be abolished, all men to be equal below the King, the
Church to be disendowed and its estates divided among the
commons, England to have but one bishop and the rest of the
hierarchy to be eliminated. The King promised everything consistent
with the “regality of his crown.” Accounts of the next moments are
so variously colored by the passions of the time that the scene
remains forever obscure. Apparently Tyler picked a quarrel with a
squire of the King’s retinue, drew a dagger, and in a ash was
himself struck down by the short sword of William Walworth,
Mayor of London.
All was confusion and frenzy. The peasants drew their bows; some
arrows ew. Richard, with extraordinary nerve, ordering no one to
follow, rode forward alone, saying to the rebels, “Sirs, what is it you
require? I am your captain. I am your King. Quiet yourselves.”
While he parleyed, Knollys’ force, hastily summoned, rode up and
surrounded the camp in mailed might with visors down and
weapons gleaming. Dismayed and leaderless, the peasants were
cowed; Wat Tyler’s head displayed on a lance completed their
collapse, like that of the Jacques at the death of Guillaume Cale.
Ordered to lay down their arms and assured of pardons to
encourage dispersal, they trailed homeward. Leaders, including
John Ball, were hanged and the rising elsewhere in England was
suppressed—with sucient brutality, if not the wild massacre that
had taken place in France after the Jacquerie. Except for scattered
retribution, the English revolt, too, was over within a month,

defeated more by fraud than by force. The pardons issued in the
King’s name were revoked without compunction, and the charters
canceled by a landowners’ Parliament on the grounds that they had
been issued under duress. To a deputation from Essex who came to
remind the King of his promise to end villeinage, Richard replied,
“Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain.”
The assumptions of autocrats are often behind the times.
Economic forces were already propelling the decline of villeinage,
and commutation continued, despite the crushing of the revolt, until
the unfree peasant gradually disappeared. Whether the revolt
hastened or delayed the process is obscure, but the immediate
outcome encouraged complacency in the ruling class, beginning
with the King. Perhaps intoxicated by success, Richard developed all
the instincts of absolutism except the toughness to quell his
opponents, and was to end as the victim of one of them. The
military saw no need for improvement; the Church was stiened
against reform. Alarmed by the Lollards’ leveling doctrines, the
privileged class turned against them. In Gower’s “Corruptions of the
Age,” the poet denounced them as breeders of division between
church and state sent into the world by Satan. Lollardy went
underground, long postponing the Protestant separation.
In these “days of wrath and anguish, days of calamity and
misery,” the laboring men’s revolt seemed to many but one more
tribulation signifying, like the Black Death, the anger of God. An
anonymous poet, associating the rising of the peasants with an
earthquake that occurred in 1382 and with the “pestilens,”
concluded that these three things
Beeth tokenes of grete vengaunce and wrake
That schulde falle for synnes sake.
Even the French raids on the English coast could be taken, as the
monk Walsingham suggested, as the Lord “calling men to
repentance by means of such terrors.” Seen in these terms, revolt
conveyed no political signicance. “Man cannot change,” a

Florentine diarist wrote at this time, “that which God, for our sins,
has willed.”
How much impact the insurrection in England had on
revolutionary sentiment abroad is uncertain. With or without it, war
and its attendant demon, taxes, would have supplied enough fuel for
discontent. Yet war could hardly have failed to give employment
and spread money—to armorers, carters, grain dealers, bakers,
horse-breeders, and a hundred other trades besides the archers, foot
soldiers, and servants in the army. Contemporaries are silent on the
subject of war as economic stimulus, but very vocal about its
unequal burden on the poor. “It should be an established principle,”
wrote Villani, “that war ought not to be paid for out of the purses of
the poor but rather by those to whom power belongs.”
This was not a principle recognized by the Duc d’Anjou, whose
pursuit of money provoked a new wave of insurrection in France
beginning in February of 1382. His projected inheritance of the
Kingdom of Naples had just been jeopardized by the overthrow of
Queen Joanna by a rival. Against the advice of Coucy, who was
summoned again from Picardy for consultation, Anjou was bent on
leading an army to Italy. At a meeting with the Provost of
Merchants and principal bourgeois in January 1382, he seems to
have wrung consent for a new sales tax on wine, salt, and other
merchandise. In fear of popular reaction, the edict was issued
secretly and the bidding for the lucrative post of tax-collector was
held behind closed doors in the Châtelet. Many came willingly
enough to bid, but hesitated to make the public announcement. No
less apprehensive, the court remained at Vincennes outside the
walls.
When tradesmen and travelers spread news of the new tax, an
outcry of angry refusal was voiced in riots at Laon, Amiens, Reims,
Orléans, and Rouen, as well as in Paris. As spokesman for the
bourgeois of the capita], Jean de Marès, an aged, respected, and
eloquent advocate who had served under every King since Philip VI,
tried in vain to persuade Anjou to rescind the order. Shopkeepers

locked out tax-collectors who came to evaluate their merchandise;
citizens seized arms, rang the tocsin, and rampaged through tax
oces. That the agitation was heated by “the example of the
English,” and even by “letters and messages from the Flemings” was
common belief. Concerted action, however, was less a fact than a
fear of the ruling class.
The riots burst into violence at the end of February in Rouen,
capital of Normandy. Here the tax on wine injured important
vintners who wished to excite popular resistance without
compromising themselves. They harangued artisans and poor
workers of the cloth trade about the shame of submitting to the tax
while distributing free wine among them. To shouts of “Haro!”
against the government, “Haro!” against tax-collectors (an obscure
cry implying rebellion), a company of 200 intoxicated drapers
rushed for the city hall to ring the tocsin. So began the famous
Harelle.
Gathering adherents, the drapers sacked the houses of the rich,
broke open coers, threw furnishings into the streets, smashed
windows and wine barrels, and let the contents ow after drinking
all they could hold. Priests, pawnbrokers, Jews, and the houses of
all former mayors were attacked, while the tocsin rang all night.
The rich ed for refuge to monasteries, and a few royal ocials and
tax-collectors were killed. The chief of the drapers’ guild, a fat,
simple-witted character called, for his bulk, Jean le Gras, was
dragged against his will to leadership of the mob and paraded
through the streets on a throne, thus compromising the upper
bourgeois in spite of their eort to remain behind the scenes.
In climactic assault, the rioters, joined by many of the better class,
attacked the Abbey of St. Ouen, hated for its large land holdings and
the privileges it maintained against the town. Doors were smashed
with axes, rent registers and charters burned, and the Abbé forced to
sign remittances of all dues owed by the town. The fact that these
documents were formulated in proper legal language testies to the
role of the upper bourgeois in the aair. Afterward, in a solemn if
not sober assembly in the market place, the crowd petitioned their

fat “King” to declare them “free of the yoke of taxes,” while some
“laughed and shook their heads” at the performance.
Fearing royal punishment, the upper bourgeois sent delegates to
Vincennes to plead for pardon. The Royal Council, fearing in its turn
the spread of rebellion to other towns, advised the boy King to
conceal his wrath and “appease the people who were very riotous.”
With appropriate display of the sacred aura of kingship, Charles VI
was sent to Rouen, where the town’s leaders, evidently nervous of
the agitation they had unleashed, promised a xed sum in aids in
return for the King’s pardon. Underneath the temporary lid, the
struggle was unresolved, and wrath on both sides only awaited
another chance.
In the same moment that Rouen was subdued, Paris rose. No one
had yet ventured to proclaim the new levy in public until one
herald, on being oered a bonus, rode into the market place and,
having won all ears by announcing a reward for the return of gold
plate stolen from the palace, then cried out the new tax and, setting
spurs to his horse, galloped away. As the news sped through the
streets, people gathered in angry groups, vowing with “terrible
oaths” never to pay, and plotting resistance. Arrests of the agitators
brought in porters, tinkers, candle-makers, pastry cooks, knife-
grinders, cowl-makers—the small tradesmen, artisans, and servants
of Paris. Next morning, March 1, when a tax-collector was seen to
demand payment from a woman vendor of watercress at Les Halles,
the market people fell upon him and killed him.
In an instant Paris was in an uproar. People ran through the
quartiers calling on their neighbors to arm “for the liberty of the
country” and rousing them with erce yells and threats. “If you do
not arm as we do,” cried one, “we will kill you right here in your
own house!” Then, in “terrible tumult,” the crowd broke into the
Hôtel de Ville in the Place de Grève, where they seized 3,000 long-
handled mallets normally used by the police. Mounted with
cylindrical heads of lead and wielded with both hands, these had
been stored by Hugues Aubriot in case of need against the English,
and now gave their name to the insurgents as Maillotins.

So armed, they inspired extra terror. While they were absorbed in
rampage throughout the right bank, nobles, prelates, and ocials,
hurriedly lling carts with their valuables, escaped to Vincennes.
Belatedly, the Maillotins closed the gates, fastened street chains, and
posted guards to block the exodus of the rich, even bringing back
some whom they caught. They hunted down notaries, jurists, and
everyone connected with taxes, invaded churches to drag tax-
collectors from sanctuary, seized one from the altar of St. Jacques,
where he was clinging in terror to a statue of the Virgin, and cut his
throat. Records everywhere were burned, the Jewish quarter looted
as always. “Turn Christian or we will kill you!” a Jewish woman
was ordered. “She said she would rather die,” an onlooker testied,
“so they killed and robbed her.” The Jews again sought shelter in
the Châtelet, but were turned away by ocials in fear of the
Maillotins. Of some thirty persons murdered the rst day, half were
Jews.
The upper bourgeois were anxious both to contain the rising and
to use it to force concessions from the crown. They quickly
mobilized a militia to resist both the rebels and armed intervention
by the King. Squads were stationed at street crossings and scouts
sent up into church towers to watch for the approach of men-at-
arms. “They soon showed themselves so strong,” wrote Buonaccorso
Pitti, a Florentine banker in Paris, that the Maillotins in time obeyed
them, with the result that the bourgeois were able to use the armed
rebels in their own struggle against the crown.
Following so closely on events in Rouen, the uprising in Paris
deepened fears of a conspiracy of revolt. The court decided to
parley. Coucy, known for his tact and persuasiveness, was sent with
the Duke of Burgundy and the Chancellor to the Porte St. Antoine to
hear the insurgents’ demands. Jean de Marès acted as mediator. The
Parisians insisted on an abolition of all levies since the coronation,
plus amnesty for all acts of riot, and the release of four bourgeois
arrested earlier for having advised against Anjou’s tax. The royal
negotiators, until they could return with an answer, granted release
of the four prisoners as a gesture of appeasement—with
contradictory results. Without waiting to hear more, the mob

stormed the Châtelet and other prisons, opening every cell and
dungeon, releasing inmates so broken or emaciated that they had to
be carried to the hospital wards of the Hôtel Dieu. All records of
trials and convictions were destroyed in bonres.
The most celebrated prisoner of Paris, Hugues Aubriot, was
among the liberated. Mounted on a “little horse,” the former Provost
was escorted to his home by the Maillotins, who begged him to
become their leader. In every rising, the same need was felt and the
same eort made to persuade or force someone of the governing
class to take charge and give orders. Aubriot wanted no part of it.
During the night, while the insurgents caroused “in eating, drinking
and debauches,” he managed to leave Paris, and when in the
morning they found him gone, a great cry was raised that the city
was betrayed.
The bourgeois pressed for a solution, anxious that “the hot
imprudence of the lowest people should not be turned to the
detriment of men of substance.” Ready to subdue Paris by whatever
means, the crown agreed to everything except pardon for those
guilty of breaking into the Châtelet—but its intent was no more
honest than Richard II’s. On receiving the royal letters conrming
the agreement, the bourgeois leaders alertly noted that the language
of the remittance was ambiguous and the document, instead of
being sealed in green wax on silk, was sealed in red wax on
parchment, denying it the quality of perpetuity.
Despite popular rage at this duplicity, the court was stiening.
Other towns where protest had erupted were found to have been
acting not in concert but independently, thus subject to local
suppression. Armed force was gathering at Vincennes and fear of
punishment spreading in Paris. The court was able to force the city’s
leaders to yield forty fomenters of the revolt, of whom fourteen
were publicly executed to the great indignation of the populace.
According to the Monk of St. Denis, others were secretly drowned in
the river by royal order. Gaining security, the Dukes sent the King
back to Rouen on March 29 to impose reprisals held in abeyance. In
a miserable exhibition of ritual joy at the royal approach, the
people, in festival clothes of blue and green, were lined up in

organized plea for clemency, crying “Noël, Noël, Vive le Roi!” which
did not suit the Duke of Burgundy. To induce the proper mood for
heavy nes, he ordered his men-at-arms to ride among the people
with drawn swords telling them “to cry rather for Mercy, la hart au
col” (with a rope around the neck), signifying the right of the King
to hang or spare them at will.
For a gift of money to the King and the Duke, all the silver and
gold plate of the confréries and their candlesticks and incense boxes
were sold. Royalty was not mollied. Despite the original pardon,
twelve of the rioters were executed, the tocsin bell taken down, the
chains for closing streets removed, nes imposed, Rouen’s charter of
liberties revoked, and its administration turned over from the
independent guilds to a royal baili. Cowed by the example, the
Estates of Normandy voted a sales and a salt tax and a tax on
income. In suppression of revolt, the crown was nding a way to ll
its treasury and, more signicantly, an opportunity to cancel town
charters and extend royal power.
The wrath of Paris was still far from subdued, and dangerous
events in Ghent augmented the fear that a general rising, if not yet
concerted, might become so. The cry of solidarity, “Vive Gant! Vive
Paris no’ mere!” was being heard in towns from the Flemish border
to the Loire.
In Ghent, the White Hoods of Jacob van Artevelde’s day
reappeared. A people’s militia was organized and a captain found in
Artevelde’s son Philip, a small, sharp-eyed man of aggressive energy
and “insinuating eloquence,” chosen largely for the aura of his
name. Forced by circumstance, if not preference, to depend on the
common people, he ordered that all classes would be heard in
counsel, “the poor like the rich,” and all would be fed alike. When
30,000 had eaten no bread for two weeks, he forced abbeys to
distribute their stores of grain and merchants to sell at xed prices.
Traditionally, the turmoils of Flanders had divided the Count, the
nobility, the urban magnates and guilds in shifting alignments
against each other, but this time they began to see in the sustained
rebellion of Ghent the red vision of revolution and closed ranks
under the Count to suppress it.

Reduced by hunger, the city agreed to a parley in April 1382. The
Count, condent of mastery, demanded that all the Gantois from
fteen to sixty should come bareheaded in their shirts with halters
around their necks halfway to Bruges, where he would determine
how many would be pardoned and how many put to death. At a
meeting in the market place, the starving townsmen were told these
terms by their deputies and oered three courses of action—to
submit, to starve, or to ght. The third was chosen: an army of
5,000 of those best t to ght was mobilized and launched against
Bruges, headquarters of the Count’s party. The result was one of the
stunning upsets of the century.
The militia of Bruges, no less condent against their old rivals
than the Count, caroused through the night and staggered forth on
the morrow, May 5, shouting and singing in drunken disorder. In
vain the Count and his knights endeavored to hold them back for
orderly advance. A blast of stone and iron cannonballs followed by
an assault of the Gantois mowed them down. Panic and ight could
not be stemmed and seem rather easily to have swept the Flemish
knights into the retreat. Louis de Male, the Count, was unhorsed
and, despite eorts to rally his forces after dark by lantern light,
avoided capture only by changing clothes with his valet and
escaping on foot to refuge in a poor woman’s hut. “Do you know
me?” he asked. “Oh yes, Monseigneur, I have often begged at your
gates.” Found by one of his knights, he called for a horse and,
provided with the indignity of a peasant’s mare, rode bareback into
Lille, a less happy journey than when long ago he had galloped
briskly away from marriage with Isabella.
Ghent was provisioned and joined in her triumph by other cities
under the cry “Tout un! (All one).” Having taken possession of
Bruges and 500 of its most notable bourgeois as hostages, Philip van
Artevelde declared himself Regent of Flanders. All the towns
surrendered to his rule, “and there he made new mayors and
aldermen and new laws.” He adopted a noble’s trappings of
command: trumpets heralded his approach, a pennon displaying
three silver hats preceded him in the streets, minstrels played at his

door. He wore scarlet and miniver and dined o the Count’s silver
plate, seized as booty.
Once again, as in the days of his father, the interests of England
and France were at stake. Louis de Male appealed for French aid to
his son-in-law and heir, the Duke of Burgundy. Artevelde oered
alliance to England. The English Commons favored it for the sake of
the wool trade, and because the Flemish, like themselves, were
Urbanist in the schism. Pope Urban declared an expedition in aid of
Flanders to be a crusade, which meant that clerical tithes could be
used toward the cost. Despite this advantage, the English nobility
hesitated to ally themselves with rebels, and while they hesitated,
their opportunity was lost.
In April the Duc d’Anjou had departed for Italy, having amassed,
by whatever means, enough money to recruit 9,000 men and furnish
himself with pavilions and equipment “the most sumptuous that any
lord had ever commanded.” The crown had less success in a
renewed demand for aids from Paris. The King at this time was at
Meaux on the Marne. Hoping that a settlement might be reached if
he placated Paris by his presence, the Council decided to send
Coucy to negotiate with the Parisians, “for he knew better how to
manage them than any other.”
Accompanied by no other lords but only by members of his
household, Coucy entered the hostile city, where he appears to have
been well regarded and well received. He went to his own residence,
recently acquired, a hôtel called the Cloître St. Jean o the Place de
Grève.* Summoning certain leaders for a conference, he reproved
them “wisely and prudently” for their wickedness in killing ocials
of the King and breaking open his prisons. For this the King could
make them pay dearly if he wished, but he did not desire to do so
because he loved Paris as his birthplace and because, it being the
capital of the kingdom, he was “unwilling to destroy its well-
intentioned inhabitants.” Coucy said he had come to make up the
quarrel between the citizens and their sovereign and would entreat
the King and his uncles “mercifully to pardon them for their evil
deeds.”

The citizens answered that they had no wish to make war against
the King but that the taxes must be repealed, at least as regards
Paris. When exempted, they would be ready to assist the King “in
any other manner.” Pouncing on this, Coucy asked, “In what
manner?” They said they would pay certain sums into the hands of a
chosen receiver every week for support of the soldiers. When Coucy
asked how much they would pay, they replied, “Such a sum as we
shall agree upon.”
Coucy managed smoothly by “handsome speeches” to obtain a
preliminary oer of 12,000 francs on condition of a pardon. This
was accepted by the King, but the conditions for his re-entering
Paris testied to the court’s nervousness: the people were to lay
down their arms, open the gates, leave the street chains down at
night so long as the King was in the city, and send six or seven
notables to Meaux as hostages. Submitted to an Assembly in Paris,
the conditions were angrily rejected by the Maillotins, who
demanded with threats and curses that the merchants join in their
opinion. With greatest reluctance, six bourgeois carried this refusal
to Meaux, under the pressure, as they told the court, of the great
fury of the people. The government decided on force. Men-at-arms
were sent to occupy the bridges upstream to cut o the supply of
food to the city, while others were let loose to pillage the faubourgs,
committing such excesses “as by an enemy upon an enemy.”
Preparing for assault of Paris, nobles collected empty wagons “to
carry away plunder from the said city if occasion oers.” The
Parisians fastened the street chains, distributed arms, and mounted
a watch on the walls.
Moderate parties on both sides, led by Coucy for the crown and
Jean de Marès for the city, still worked for a settlement. Their
combined eloquence and inuence gained the people’s consent to a
tax of 80,000 francs to be collected by their own receivers and
distributed directly to troops on active service, untouched by royal
uncles or treasurers. Paris was to receive in exchange a general
pardon and the King’s written promise that the aids would not be
used as a precedent for new taxes, and that he would hold no malice
against Paris in the future. If any trust in a royal pardon still

remained, it was because of a quality of sacredness in an anointed
king and a profound need to perceive him—as opposed to the lords
—as the people’s protector.
At this moment Ghent’s startling victory over the Count of
Flanders intervened, frightening the propertied class and giving the
court urgent reason to settle with Paris. With Anjou gone to Italy
and Berry dispatched as Governor of Languedoc, the Duke of
Burgundy was in control, and his dominant purpose now was to
employ French force for the retrieval of his heritage in Flanders.
Terms with Paris were hastily concluded.
The King re-entered the capital only for a day, to the great
displeasure of the citizens. Rouen erupted again when tax-collectors
set up their tables in the Cloth Hall but the rising was quickly
suppressed bythe royal governor with the aid of an armed galley in
the river. Southern France too was in turmoil, spread by bands of
dispossessed peasants and vagabond poor. The Monk of St. Denis
called them the désespérés and crève-de-faim (the hopeless and
starving), but locally they were called the Tuchins. Some say the
name derives from tuechien (kill-dog), meaning people reduced to
such misery that they ate dogs as in times of famine; others, that it
derived from touche, meaning, in the local patois, the maquis or
brush where the dispossessed took refuge.
Through the uplands of Auvergne, as well as in the south, the
Tuchins, in bands of 20, 60, or 100, organized a guerrilla warfare
against established society. They preyed upon the clergy—hated for
their tax exemptions—ambushed travelers, held lords for ransom,
attacking all, it was said, who did not have callused hands. Like the
Maa of Sicily, they originated out of misery to prey upon the rich,
but, on becoming organized, were used by the rich in local feuds
and brigandage. Towns and seigneurs hired them in their war
against the crown’s ocers, who were called the “eaters.” The
unrest in Languedoc was to reach the force of insurrection in the
following year.
In all these evils, the upper class felt the rising tide of subversion.
The rioters of Béziers in Languedoc were reported in a plot to
murder all citizens having more than 100 livres, while forty of the

plotters planned to kill their own wives and marry the richest and
most beautiful widows of their victims. The English peasants seemed
to one chronicler “like mad dogs … like Bacchantes dancing through
the country.” The Ciompi were “ruans, evil-doers,
thieves … useless men of low condition … dirty and shabby,” and
the Maillotins were viewed as their brothers. The weavers of Ghent
were credited with intent to exterminate all good folk down to the
age of six.
The source of all subversion, the focus of danger, was seen to lie
in Ghent.
Conscious of all that hung upon the outcome, the French prepared
for an oensive in strength in Flanders. Rebellion of the lower class
against the upper, danger of an English alliance with Artevelde, the
hostile allegiance of Flanders to the Urbanist cause in the schism
were involved. Coucy was among the rst designated for the army,
which he joined with a retinue of three other knights banneret, ten
knights bachelor, 37 squires, and ten archers, subsequently enlarged
to 63 squires and 30 archers. His cousin Raoul, Bastard of Coucy,
son of his uncle Aubert, was his second in command, though listed
as a squire. In the sullen atmosphere, it took six months before an
adequate and well-equipped force was assembled, and it was
November before the march began. Many advised against starting
on the edge of winter, but anxiety to forestall the English carried the
enterprise forward through days of rain and leaden cold.
The army’s strength, wildly and variously reported at gures up
to 50,000, probably numbered about 12,000—large enough to
require foot soldiers, as was often necessary, to cut down hedges
and trees to widen the line of march.
The King, now fourteen, rode with the army accompanied by his
uncles Burgundy, Bourbon, and Berry and the foremost lords of
France—Clisson, Sancerre, Coucy, Admiral de Vienne, the Counts de
la Marche, d’Eu, Blois, Harcourt, and many notable seigneurs and
squires. The scarlet Oriamme, reserved for urgent occasions or war
against the indel, was carried for the rst time since Poitiers to

emphasize the character of holy war—which was somewhat
embarrassed by the fact that if the enemy was Urbanist, so was the
King’s ally Louis of Flanders. Unpopular in any case because of his
dealings with the English, Louis was coldly treated throughout the
campaign.
Hostility lay at the army’s back. French towns and populace,
sympathetic to Ghent, withheld or hampered supplies and continued
to resist the payment of aids. The Duke of Burgundy, if not the King,
was denounced aloud. In Paris, the Maillotins swore on their mallets
an oath of collective resistance to tax-collectors. They began to forge
helmets and weapons at night, and plotted to seize the Louvre and
the great hôtels of Paris so that these could not be used as
strongholds against them. They were restrained from action,
however, by the counsel of Nicolas de Flament, a cloth merchant
who had been associated with Etienne Marcel in the killing of the
two Marshals in 1358. He advised waiting until it was seen whether
the men of Ghent prevailed; then the right moment would come. At
the same time, commoners rioted at Orléans, Blois, Châlons, Reims,
Rouen, voicing such sentiments as showed that “the Devil was
entered into their heads to have slain all noblemen.”
On reaching the river Lys at the border of Flanders, the royal
army found the bridge across to Comines destroyed by the enemy
and all boats removed. The river’s banks were marshy and muddy;
900 Flemings waited on the other side under the command of
Artevelde’s lieutenant, Peter van den Bossche, standing with battle-
ax in hand. Coucy had advised crossing farther east at Tournai so as
to be in contact with supplies from Hainault, but Clisson had
insisted on the more direct route and was now greatly vexed,
acknowledging that he should have taken Coucy’s advice.
While foragers were sent for timber and fence rails to repair the
bridge, a party of knights was guided to three sunken boats, which
were hauled up and rigged by ropes to both banks at a spot
concealed from the Flemings. By this means, nine at a time, an
adventurous force of knights and squires was ferried across while
the main force diverted the Flemings’ attention by re of crossbows
and “bombards” or small portable cannon. Fearing to be discovered,

yet determined “to gain reputation as valiant men-at-arms,” the
adventurers, joined by Marshal Sancerre, continued crossing until
400 had reached the other side. No varlet was permitted to
accompany them.
Deciding to seize Comines at once, they buckled their armor,
raised their banners, and marched into the open in battle formation,
to the extreme anxiety of the watching Constable, whose “blood
began to tremble in fear for them.” “Ah, by St. Ives, by St. George,
by Our Lady, what do I see over there? Ha, Rohan! Ha, Beaumanoir!
Ha, Rochefort, Malestroit, Lavalle,” Clisson cried, naming each
banner as he recognized it. “What do I see? I see the ower of our
army outnumbered! I would rather have died than witnessed this.…
Wherefore am I Constable of France if without my counsel you put
yourself in this adventure? If you lose, the fault shall be laid to me
and it shall be said that I sent you thither.” He proclaimed that all
who wished should now join the force on the other side and issued
frantic orders to hasten repair of the bridge. With darkness falling,
the Flemings were ordered by their leader not to attack, and the
French for the same reason halted. Unsheltered in a cold wind, with
their feet in mud and rain running down their helmets, they
remained in armor through the night, keeping up their spirits by
staying alert against attack.
At daybreak both sides advanced, the French shouting the war
cries of many absent seigneurs to make their numbers seem larger.
Again Clisson suered unrestrained agonies of anxiety, bewailing his
inability to cross over with all his army. In the event, when the
clash came, the long French spears tipped with Bordeaux steel
outreached the Flemings’ weapons, pierced their thin mail, and
gained the ascendancy. Peter van den Bossche was struck down,
wounded in head and shoulder, but was carried to safety. While the
Flemings fought in despair and village bells rang to summon help,
the French nished repair of the bridge. Clisson’s force thundered
across, routed the defenders, and completed the capture of Comines.
Flemings were chased and killed in streets and elds, in mills and
monasteries where theysought shelter, and in neighboring towns. In
a moment the pillagers were scouring the country and nding rich

plunder, for—trusting in the Lys—the Flemings had not removed
their goods or cattle to the walled towns.
Upon the King’s entry into Comines, the upper bourgeois of Ypres
and neighboring towns overthrew Artevelde’s governors and sent
deputies to the French with terms of surrender. On their knees
before Charles VI, twelve rich notables of Ypres oered to turn over
their town to him permanently in return for peaceful occupation.
The King was pleased to accept at a price of 40,000 francs, which
was immediately pledged. Malines, Cassel, Dunkirk, and nine other
towns followed suit at a further payment of 60,000 francs. Although
the terms of surrender supposedly exempted towns from pillage, the
Bretons could not be restrained. Rather than encumber themselves
with furs, fabrics, and vessels, they sold their loot cheap to the
people of Lille and Tournai, “caring only for silver and gold.”
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.
At Ghent, some fty miles to the north, Philip van Artevelde
summoned from the vicinity every man capable of bearing arms,
assuring them they would defeat the French King and win
independent sovereignty for Flanders. For months his envoys had
been pressing England, but though a herald had come with terms of
a treaty, no ships lled with soldiers followed. Even so, he had
another ally: winter was closing in. If he had fortied his position
and stayed on the defensive, he could have left it to winter and
scarcity to defeat the invaders. But the threat of an internal rising by
the Count’s party which might turn over Bruges to the French forced
Artevelde into action, even though he still held the principal citizens
of Bruges as hostages. Perhaps he was moved not by fear but
overcondence; perhaps he simply miscalculated.
Armed with bludgeons and iron-pointed staves, with large knives
in their belts and iron caps on their heads, a formidable force of
“40,000” or “50,000” Flemings (in reality, probably under 20,000)
was collected, led by 9,000 of Ghent on whom Philip relied most.
Carrying the banners of towns and trades, they marched south to
meet the enemy. Scouts reported their approach to the French, who
took up a position between the hill and the town of Roosebeke a few
miles from Passchendaele, where history held another bloodshed in

waiting for 1916. As an Urbanist, Louis de Male was forced by the
French to withhold his division from the order of battle so they
should not have to ght alongside a heretic and schismatic. In rain
and cold the King’s army awaited the conict impatiently, “for they
were very discomted at being out in such weather.”
At the nal war council on the eve of combat, an extraordinary
decision was taken: that Clisson should resign his oce for the day
of battle to be near the King’s person, and be replaced as Constable
by Coucy. Very agitated and pleading that he would be thought a
coward by the army, Clisson begged the King for a reversal. The
bewildered boy, after a long silence, consented, “for you see further
in this matter than I do or those who rst proposed it.”
What lay behind the proposal is unspoken in the chronicles; the
only clue is Clisson’s t of anxiety at the Lys. In a man who could
cut o fteen heads without a twinge, it reected unusual tension
and must have persuaded his equally tense colleagues to turn to
Coucy and the extreme expedient of changing Constables in
midstream. Win or lose, ghting against other knights changed
nothing fundamental, but in this ght the nobles felt their order
itself endangered. The sentiment is reected by Froissart in many
variations of his statement that if the French King and “noble
chivalry” had met defeat in Flanders, all nobles would have been
“dead and lost in France” and “commoners would have rebelled in
divers countries to destroy all the nobility.”
Artevelde on the eve of battle now favored the defensive and
advised standing in place against the enemy. He had the advantage
of terrain, having taken up a good position on the hill, and he
believed the French in their impatience and discomfort would grow
reckless or careless or even turn back. He was overruled by men still
in the pride of their earlier victory over the Count at Bruges and
eager for a ght. Accepting the decision, Artevelde ordered the
army to give no quarter and take no prisoners other than the King,
“for he is but a child who acts only as instructed. We shall bring him
to Ghent and teach him to speak Flemish.” As for tactics, he
commanded the men to keep always in a compact body “so that
none may break you,” and for greater solidarity to hold their

weapons with arms intertwined. They were to confound the enemy
with the heavy re of the crossbows and bombards they had used at
Bruges and then, advancing shoulder to shoulder, overcome the
French line by the sheer weight and solidity of their ranks.
In the tension of the night before combat, Flemish guards
reported shouts and clang of arms from the French camp, as if the
enemy were preparing a night attack. Others thought it was “the
devils of hell running and dancing about the place where the battle
was to be because of the great prey they expected there.”
On the morning of November 29, 1382, two hostile halves of
society moved toward each other through a mist “so thick it was
almost night.” With their horses held at the rear, the French
advanced on foot and, contrary to custom, in silence without battle
cries, all eyes on the dark mass ahead. Descending the hill in close
order with staves upright, the Flemings appeared like a moving
forest. They opened with a massive re of crossbows and bombards,
then charged with lowered staves and the force of “enraged boars.”
The French plan was for the King’s battalion under the Constable to
hold the center while two stronger wings—of which one was
commanded by Bourbon and Coucy—closed in on the enemy from
either side. Under the force of the Flemish charge, the French center
gave way and in the turmoil the Bourbon-Coucy battalion found
itself blocked.
“See, good cousin,” cried Bourbon (as reported by his
contemporary biographer), “we cannot advance to attack our
enemies except through our Constable’s ranks.”
“Monseigneur, you say true,” answered Coucy, here credited with
devising a plan of action on the spot. “And it seems to me that if we
were to advance as a wing of the King’s battalion and take the hill
we should have a good day’s ght at God’s pleasure.”
“Fair cousin, that is good advice,” Bourbon agreed, and so, as
14th century military history is written, they went up the hill and
took the enemy from behind with terrible blows of lance, ax, and
sword, and “whoever saw the Sire de Coucy break through the press
and strike the Flemings, cutting and killing, he will forever
remember a valiant knight.” In the respite aorded by this attack,

the Constable’s battalion recovered and returned, along with the
other wing, to the fray. Heavy battle-axes and maces cut through
Flemish helmets with a noise “as loud as all the armorers of Paris
and Brussels working together.” Compressed ever more tightly by
the French, the Flemings were so squeezed against each other that
the inner ranks could not raise arms or weapons; even breathing
became dicult—they could neither strike nor cry out.
As French lances pierced and axes hacked at the solid mass of
bodies, many of whom lacked helmet or cuirass, the dead piled up
in heaps. French foot soldiers, penetrating between the men-at-arms,
nished o the fallen with their knives, “with no more mercy than if
they had been dogs.” Under the attack of the Bourbon-Coucy wing,
the Flemish rear turned and ed, throwing away their weapons as
they ran. Philip van Artevelde, ghting in the front ranks, tried to
rally them, but from his position could exercise no eective
command. He lacked the assurance of the Black Prince at Poitiers to
retain control from a hilltop above the battle. Borne backward by
the mass as the rout spread, he was trampled and killed under the
feet of his own forces, as was his banner-bearer, a woman named
Big Margot.
Bourbon and Coucy, mounting their horses, led their battalion in
pursuit of the fugitives, and in a erce ght routed 3,000 Flemings
from a wood where they had gathered for a nal defense. The
debacle was complete. While their battalion pursued and killed as
far as Courtrai, Coucy and Bourbon rode back to Roosebeke, where
the King “welcomed them joyously and praised God for the victory
which, through their eorts, He had given.” The battle was over in
the space of two hours. Many Flemish bodies were found without
wounds, crushed to death under their companions’ pressure, but so
many thousands were killed by French weapons that “the ground
was inundated by blood.” The number of dead “miscreants” was
reported in gures of fantasy, but agreement was general that few of
the Flemish army survived. Fit only to be the “prey of dogs and
crows,” the bodies were left unburied, so that for days afterward,
the stench of the battleeld was insupportable.

While being divested of his armor in his scarlet pavilion, the King
expressed a wish to see Artevelde dead or alive. For a reward of 100
francs, searchers found his body, which was taken before the
victors, who stared at it for a while in silence. The King gave it a
little kick, “treating it as a villein.” Then it was taken away and
“hanged upon a tree.” Artevelde’s image was subsequently woven
into a tapestry depicting the battle, which the Duke of Burgundy
commissioned and used as a carpet because he liked to walk on the
commoners who had attempted to overthrow the ordained order.
The sack of Courtrai was merciless, in revenge for defeat in the
Battle of the Spurs eighty years before. Citizens ed vainly to cellars
and churches to escape the soldiers; they were dragged into the
streets and killed. On his knees Louis de Male begged mercy for the
town, but was ignored. Every house was ransacked and even nobles
of the town and their children carried away for ransom. The Duke of
Burgundy, with a Valois eye for the best, dismounted the cathedral
clock, nest in Flanders, and transported it by ox wagon to Dijon
(where it still is). When the King departed, Courtrai was set on re
at his command, “so that it should be known ever after that the
French King had been there.” Clisson, restored to his normal
ferocity, was thought to have had a hand in the order.
The totality of victory had one major exception. Ghent, the main
objective, was never taken. At rst news of their army’s defeat, the
people were stunned and despairing, so that if the French had come
to their gates in the several days after the battle “they would have
suered them to enter without resistance.” But medieval war had a
tendency to stop short of political objective. Weary of cold and rain,
occupied with prot and revenge in the immediate aftermath of
Roosebeke, and condent that Ghent would surrender on demand,
the French did not go north.
Peter van den Bossche, despite his wounds, had himself carried to
Ghent and re-inspirited the city, insisting the war was not over, that
the French would not come in winter, and with new men in a new
season “we shall do more than we ever did before,” even without
English help. The English, as soon as they heard of the Flemish
defeat, broke o negotiations and were “not greatly displeased” by

the outcome. Had it gone otherwise, they feared the “great pride of
the commoners” would have encouraged a new rising in their own
country.
Afterward, when the French attempted a parley, Ghent, as “hard
and proud” as if it had won the victory, refused absolutely to yield
to the Count of Flanders but only to the direct suzerainty of the King
of France. The Count, and more especially Philip of Burgundy, the
heir apparent, rejected that arrangement. By this time at the end of
December it was too late to begin a siege. Having restored authority
in the rest of Flanders, though they failed to convert it to Pope
Clement, the French were ready to go home. They had business to
settle with Paris.
In the rst week of January 1383 the royal army halted outside
Paris and sent for the Provost and magistrates to assure the capital’s
submission. With armed forces at hand, and strengthened by the
victory of Roosebeke, the crown had greater authority than in the
year before, and was prepared to use it. Breton and Norman
companies were deployed in a semi-circle around Paris, champing
on the brink of pillage. A huge force of Parisians, in a desperate
show of the strength which they had long prepared, marched out
armed with crossbows, shields, and mallets and assumed battle
formation beyond Montmartre. Warily, the crown sent a delegation
including the Constable and Coucy to appraise their strength and
ask why they advanced thus combatively. The commoners replied
that they wished the King to view their strength, which, being very
young, he had never seen. They were sternly ordered to return and
lay down their arms if they wished the King to enter Paris. Subdued
since the verdict of Roosebeke, their spirit did not match their show;
they turned back without resistance. The royal army was
nevertheless notied to appear in the guise of war, not peace—that
is, in armor—for the entry into Paris.
Coucy and Marshal Sancerre were sent to open the city by taking
down the solid gates from their hinges and removing street chains.
The gates were thrown into the streets that the King might ride over

them—“to trample the pride of the city,” as the Monk of St. Denis
sadly acknowledged. Alarm and anger rose among the citizens, who
posted guards at night and said, “There will be no peace yet. The
King has destroyed and pillaged the land of Flanders and he will do
the same in Paris.” To dampen trouble, heralds proclaimed to the
people that no sack nor harm would come to them. On the day of
entry, the bourgeois, represented by the Provost of Merchants, the
magistrates, and 500 notables, came forward in festival clothes in
the ritual plea for pardon. As they knelt, the King and his nobles,
Coucy among them, anked by men-at-arms with lances poised,
rode past them through the shorn gates into the city.
Men-at-arms were immediately posted at all bridges and at
squares where the people were accustomed to gather. Houses where
soldiers were to lodge were required to keep their doors open.
Everyone possessing arms was ordered to bring them in a sack to
the Louvre, from where they were removed to Vincennes.
Arrests began at once, with special attention to the bourgeois
notables, in whom the crown recognized its real opponents. Jean de
Marès and Nicolas de Flament were among 300 substantial citizens
arrested. Two rich merchants, a draper and a goldsmith, were
executed at once, and thirteen more within a week. Nicolas de
Flament, spared in 1358, went to the block now. All the bourgeois
who had served in the city militia during the revolt were summoned
one by one before the Council to be sentenced to heavy nes. Free
to take revenge, the King’s government continued to impose
convictions, nes, and executions for the next six weeks. “They cut
o heads,” recorded the Ménagier de Paris, “three and four at a
time,” to a total of more than 100, not counting those executed in
other rebel towns.
The seal of conquest was the re-imposition of a sales tax of twelve
pence in the livre on all merchandise, plus extra on wine and salt—
the same tax that had provoked the revolt of the Maillotins and that
the Parisians had been refusing to pay for the past year. A week
later, before a full assembly of the governing class of the city, the
King’s ordinance was read revoking the privileges and franchises of
Paris. The proud rights of self-government and chartered liberties,

hard-won by the towns through the High Middle Ages, were being
drained o and absorbed by a central government. In Paris the
oces of Provost of Merchants and of the magistrates were
suppressed and their jurisdictions taken over by the crown. The
major trades were deprived of autonomy, as at Rouen, and subjected
henceforward to supervisors appointed by the Provost of Paris. The
police squads formerly maintained by the Provost of Merchants
were abolished and the defense of Paris taken into the hands of the
King. Meetings of confréries, as possible breeders of trouble, and all
public assemblies except for attendance at church were forbidden.
Participants in illicit meetings were to be treated as “rebel and
disobedient,” subject to the death penalty and conscation of
property.
The trial of Jean de Marès followed. He had not left Paris like
other notables, the Monk of St. Denis recalled, but for more than a
year had contained and moderated the fury of the people and
striven to mediate between the court and the city. For that the
hatred of the Dukes pursued him. A train of informers was brought
forward to support the charge that he had counseled the rebels to
take up arms. He was convicted, condemned to death, stripped of
gown and hood, and carried in a cart with twelve others to the place
of execution at Les Halles. Placed above the others in the cart, “so
that he should be viewed by all,” he cried to the crowd collected in
the streets, “Where are those who have condemned me? Let them
come forward to justify my conviction if they can.” The people
sorrowed for him, but none dared to speak.
Told by the executioner to beg mercy of the King that he might be
pardoned for his crimes, Marès replied that he had done nothing for
which to beg pardon, “but from God alone I shall beg mercy and ask
Him humbly to forgive me my sins.” After words of farewell to the
people, who were all in tears, he turned to his death.
Not yet done, the crown summoned a mammoth assembly in the
courtyard of the Marble Table on March 1, anniversary of the
Maillotins’ revolt. One person from every house in Paris was
required to attend, without head covering. Charles VI, attended by
his uncles and Council, sat on a platform while Pierre d’Orgement as

Chancellor read in the King’s name a harsh accusation of all the
crimes committed by the people of Paris since the death of Charles
V. After speaking of the executions, he cried in a terrible voice, “It is
not nished!” The people knew their roles. Wails of fear rose from
the crowd. With disordered clothes and hair, the wives of
imprisoned men stretched out their arms to the King, imploring
mercy in tears. The proud uncles and the King’s younger brother,
Louis, knelt to beg for the relief of civil rather than criminal
punishment—civil meaning nes. Orgement announced that the
King, obeying his natural goodness and the pleas of his kin,
consented to a general pardon, revocable if ever the Parisians
returned to their evil ways. The convicted would be released from
prison and pain of death but not from payment of nes. Some men
of ample property were ned amounts equal to all they owned in
money, houses, and land, reducing them to ruin.
Similar punitive measures were taken at Amiens, whose ancient
charter was revoked, at Laon, Beauvais, Orléans, and other cities.
The immense sums collected in nes amounted to 400,000 francs
from Paris and a comparable gure from the provinces. Much of it
went to enrich the uncles, to pay the Constable and other royal
ocials who had received no salaries for the past two years, and to
reimburse nobles, including Coucy, for expenses of the Flanders
campaign. Coucy received 13,200 francs and a pledge of one third
of the aids levied on his domain to cover the expense of fortifying
his towns and castles.
Strangely, in view of his role in removing the gates, Coucy
retained a favorable image in Paris. A saying was recorded among
the people that “the Sire de Coucy had not feared to remonstrate
with the King and tell him that if he destroyed his own country he
would be reduced to plying the workman’s spade.” The prophecy
picturing the King doing a peasant’s work captured the public mind
and was to have a long and curious fe.
The authority of the lions was regained in full. Paris did not
recover a Provost of Merchants for thirty years; Rouen never

recovered the liberties it had enjoyed before the Harelle. Where
insurgency had won momentary control, it was because of the
absence of organized and ready forces of public order. The state had
no arrangements for meeting revolution, although, by contrast, the
role of suppression was as formalized as a ceremonial rite.
Except in Ghent, insurgency could not retain a grip because it,
too, had no prepared role and its ranks were divided. The poor
provided the explosive force, but became the agents of the merchant
class, whose interests were not theirs. The towns themselves failed
in their aim because they were each other’s enemies. Ghent
maintained its struggle for two more years until, on the death of
Louis de Male, its liberties were restored by the Duke of Burgundy
to consolidate his heritage. Elsewhere, communal liberties and
autonomy were lost or reduced. The process that had operated in
Etienne Marcel’s revolt continued: to the extent that the towns lost,
the monarchy gained, while through nancial support the crown
increasingly made partners of the nobility.
After the storm, the lower class was seen as more dangerous,
more suspect. It gained recognition as a dynamic rather than passive
section of society, by some in fear, by others in sympathy.
“Therefore the innocent must die of hunger with whom these great
wolves daily ll their maw,” wrote Deschamps. “This grain, this
corn, what is it but the blood and bones of the poor folk who have
plowed the land? Wherefore their spirit crieth on God for
vengeance. Woe to the lords, the councillors and all who steer us
thus, and woe to all who are of their party, for no man careth now
but to ll his bags.”
The wave of insurrection passed, leaving little change in the
condition of the working class. Inertia in the scales of history weighs
more heavily than change. Four hundred years were to elapse before
the descendants of the Maillotins seized the Bastille.

The hotel, called Rieulet or Nieulet in some contemporary manuscripts, was
located in the now non-existent Rue St. Jean-en-Grève, which ran from the

present Hôtel de Ville to the Rue de Rivoli. The residence was listed as sold to
Raoul de Coucy, “conseiller du Roi,” in 1379, probably an error for
Enguerrand, who in a charter of 1390 referred to it as “nôtre hostel à Paris.”

Chapter 19

T
The Lure of Italy
he lure of a foothold in Italy exerted the same pull on the
French as a foothold in France exerted on the English. From
the time the Duc d’Anjou crossed the Alps in 1382, the
Angevin claim to the Kingdom of Naples drew France
southward, creating a habit of intervention that was to persist on
and o for 500 years. Its pattern was laid at the start, when Anjou’s
expedition encountered misfortune almost at once and sent
repeatedly throughout the year 1383 for reinforcement under the
Sire de Coucy.
Angevins had ruled the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily since
Charles of Anjou, younger brother of St. Louis, had been placed on
the throne by papal inuence in 1266. Sicily was absorbed by
Aragon at the end of the century, but the Angevin dynasty retained
the mainland portion, covering the entire lower half of Italy south of
Rome, the largest domain on the peninsula.* Flourishing in
commerce and culture, it enjoyed the civilized reign of King Robert,
the “new Solomon” whose literary approval Petrarch came to seek.
Boccaccio followed because he preferred residence in the “happy,
peaceful, generous, and magnicent Naples with its one monarch”
to his native republican Florence “devoured by innumerable cares.”
Robert built his palace, Castel Nuovo, on the water’s edge facing
Naples’ incomparable bay, where ships of Genoa, Spain, and
Provence came to trade. Nobles and merchants added their palazzos
alongside, bringing down Tuscan artists to ll them with frescoes
and sculpture. Under just laws and a stable currency, with security
of roads, hostels for traveling merchants, festivities, tournaments,
music, and poetry, Robert’s reign, which ended in 1343, was said to
be “something like Paradise.” Citizens could journey unarmed

through Calabria and Apulia “except fora wooden club to defend
themselves against dogs.”
The blight of the 14th century descended after the good King’s
death. Robert’s talents petered out in his granddaughter and
successor, Joanna, whose four ill-fated eorts to bolster the female
succession by marriage brought turmoil culminating in the schism.
The conict of popes made Naples a battleeld. When Joanna opted
for Clement and, at his instigation, named Anjou her heir, the
furious Urban declared her deposed as a heretic and schismatic and
crowned another Angevin descendant, Charles, Duke of Durazzo, as
rightful King of Naples. Elevated from an obscure Albanian
principality to a great Mediterranean kingdom, this prince took the
throne as Charles III.
A small, fair-haired man said to resemble Robert in courage and
geniality as well as love of learning, Charles of Durazzo did not let
his good nature inhibit his struggle against Joanna. Within two
months he had defeated her forces, established himself in the Castel
Nuovo, and imprisoned the Queen in the hope of coercing her to
appoint him her heir and thus legitimize his conquest. To put on the
garment of legitimacy is the rst aim of every coup. When Joanna
refused to acknowledge him and Anjou entered Italy on his way to
her aid, Charles did not hesitate. He had the Queen strangled in
prison and her corpse exposed in the cathedral for six days before
burial so that no doubt should be left of her death.
Anjou came by way of Avignon, where he, in turn, was crowned
King of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem, including Provence, by Pope
Clement, and his rival, Charles of Durazzo, was simultaneously
excommunicated. Despite his persuasive arts, Anjou had been
unable during the insurrections in France to collect enough funds to
take him all the way to Naples and had tried in vain to persuade the
Royal Council to nance his venture as a national war. Now, as
sovereign of Provence, he minted huge quantities of coin and
enriched his troops by allowing them freedom to loot his new
subjects on the pretext of punishment for their recent rebelliousness.
He collected additional money and forces from Pope Clement and
was joined in his enterprise by that energetic nobleman, Amadeo,

the Green Count of Savoy, who contributed 1,100 lances at a cost to
Anjou of 20,000 ducats a month.
Replenished and leading an army of 15,000 “gorged with booty,”
Anjou crossed into Lombardy followed by 300 pack mules and
unnumbered baggage wagons. The Green Count’s equipment
included an enormous green pavilion ornamented with twelve
shields bearing the arms of Savoy in red and white, an emerald silk
surcoat embroidered with the red-and-white device, twelve saddle-
and-bridle sets all in green, and four others ornamented with
“Hungarian ribbon knots” for his immediate retinue, and green
shoes, hoods, and tunics for his pages. When, before leaving, certain
of his barons objected to the venture on various grounds, he
silenced them, saying with unhappy clairvoyance, “I will fulll what
I have promised even if it means my death.” Many notable lords
joined under his banner “for love of the prowess and largesse they
admired in him.”
In Milan, Visconti wealth supplied the largest portion of Anjou’s
funds just as it had a very large portion of his father’s ransom, in
exchange for the same kind of goods. Anjou’s seven-year-old son,
Louis, was oered in betrothal to Bernabò’s daughter Lucia. For the
prospect of a daughter as future Queen of Naples, Bernabò paid
50,000 orins—roughly equivalent to the annual income of about
100 bourgeois families*—plus an additional sum from Gian
Galeazzo. Anjou was using every means to collect resources
adequate for the tting display of a king en route to his kingdom.
In plumed helmets and sumptuous pomp, loaded with gifts and
honors, he and Amadeo and their knights left Milan, followed by
such numbers of men and wagons as “seemed like an army of
Xerxes.” They headed east for the dicult route down the Adriatic
coast, because Florence, which opposed both Anjou and Durazzo,
did not want the embarrassment—nor the pillaging—of their
passage and had raised 6,000 men to block the road through
Tuscany. According to the Monk of St. Denis—who, like his fellow
monk Walsingham, took a sour view of marauding dukes—Anjou
and his nobles attered themselves that through them the Lilies of
France would spread afar “the sweet perfume of glory.” As they

rode, they celebrated their enterprise in song and verse and
“fabulous recitals” of French valor.
Although Anjou had proclaimed his intention to “promote the fate
of the Church by the force of chivalry”—that is, by force of arms—
he failed to exert that force against Urban. Leaving the coast at
Ancona to cross the Apennines early in September, he bypassed the
road to Rome, although a bold eort might have taken the city at
this time. Agents had brought word that Hawkwood’s White
Company, promised for Urban’s defense, had been held back by
Florence for her own protection. Instead, against the advice of
Amadeo of Savoy, Anjou took the lower road for Naples, and as the
army passed through deles and across gorges, between peaks “that
touched the sky,” calamity overtook them. Highland brigands,
pulled by strings from Naples, attacked the baggage train and the
rear guard escorting the treasure, with the result that Anjou arrived
at Caserta, within a day’s march of Naples, very much poorer than
when he set out. Reconnoitering terrain in advance was not part of
medieval warfare because it was not part of tournaments. The clash
was everything.
By this time it was November. On entering Neapolitan territory,
Anjou had stopped for a week at Aquila to partake in welcoming
ceremonies oered by partisans of his cause. The delays in his
progress allowed time for Hawkwood, released by Florence, to come
to his opponent’s aid. Now in need of a quick decision, Anjou sent
the traditional challenge to Durazzo demanding a time and place of
battle. Charles III proved elusive. Fortied in Castel Nuovo, he
counted on outlasting Anjou and exhausting his resources until he
could be easily beaten and any territory he had meanwhile taken,
regained. Professing himself overjoyed to accept Anjou’s challenges,
Charles kept him on the move, forcing him into the expense and
fatigue of marches toward a combat that vanished at every
approach.
In deepening anxiety by Christmastime, Anjou made a will and
Amadeo, giving up hope of victory, proposed a negotiated peace. In
return for Anjou relinquishing his claim to Naples, Charles of
Durazzo was to relinquish his claim to Provence and give Anjou safe

passage to the coast for return to France. Charles III rejected the
terms. An arranged battle of ten champions on either side was then
agreed upon and, as usual when the stakes were important, did not
take place.
In February of 1383 an epidemic spread among the army in the
mountains above Naples, carrying o large numbers, among them
Amadeo of Savoy, at the age of 49. On March 1, a dreary year away
from the snows of Savoy, the splendid green career came to an end.
Hurriedly summoned, Anjou wept helpless tears at the deathbed.
Foiled and hungry, the Angevin forces retreated to the heel of
Italy. All that remained of the kingly treasure was used to buy
provisions. Anjou’s gold and silver plate brought little money and
even his nuptial crown, which he had brought to serve at his
coronation, had to be sold. The resplendent hauberk embroidered in
gold, worn over his armor, went too, and he wore in its place a
simple cloth with eur-delys painted in yellow. In place of the
delicate meats and pastries he was accustomed to, he ate rabbit stew
and barley bread. As the months went by, starving pack animals
could not move and war-horses, “instead of pawing the ground and
whinnying with pride, languished with lowered heads like common
beasts.”
Ever since he had left Paris, Anjou had been bombarding the
Council by letter and messenger to fulll its promise to nance a
supplementary campaign against Naples under the command of
Enguerrand de Coucy. While still in Avignon, he had urged his agent
in Paris, Pierre Gérard, to make every eort to engage Coucy. No
money was to be paid to him until he had committed himself in
writing to join Anjou, but Gérard was instructed “always to proceed
with this seigneur as graciously as possible.” Pope Clement urgently
supported Anjou’s pleas to the crown, reporting “superb” oers from
various parts of Italy and every promise of success, and expressing
his deep chagrin at the refusal of the French Council to aid an
enterprise on which the health of the Church depended.
Nevertheless, Anjou was left dangling through the year of

Roosebeke. Not until after the suppression of Paris, when the
Treasury had been replenished by nes, was the crown ready to
fulll its promise. By this time Amadeo was dead and the “army of
Xerxes” huddled in misery at Bari.
Coucy was ready and eager to go to Anjou’s aid. He was in
constant consultation in Paris with Anjou’s chancellor, Bishop Jean
le Fèvre, and repeatedly asked to know if Le Fèvre had obtained a
positive reply from the King. At last, in April 1383, the Council
agreed to give Anjou 190,000 francs, of which 80,000 represented
aids levied on his own possessions. Just at that moment, England in
a last inrmity of war hunger, launched yet another invasion. All
energies were turned to meet it, and all men-at-arms, by order of the
Duke of Burgundy, were prohibited from leaving the kingdom.
Coucy’s expedition was frustrated. An army was indeed organized,
not for Italy but once again for Flanders where the English had
seized Dunkirk.
Led by Henry Despenser, Bishop of Norwich, the English raid was
the fruition of Urban’s eort for a “crusade” against schismatic
France. It began in scandal and was to end in asco. The moral
harm done to papal obedience in England by the methods of
nancing the “crusade” outweighed anything the papacy could have
gained, even with success. Friars as papal agents were endowed
with “wonderful indulgences” and extra powers to sell or, worse, to
refuse absolution “unless the people gave according to their ability
and estate.” Even the sacrament was at times withheld from
parishioners who refused an oering to the crusade. Gold, silver,
jewels, and money were collected, especially, according to
Knighton, “from ladies and other women.… Thus the secret treasure
of the realm, which was in the hands of women, was drawn out.”
Protest was re-invigorated and evoked one of Wyclif’s last tracts,
“Against Clerical Wars.” Lollard preachers denounced “these worldly
prelates … chief captains and arrayers of Satan’s battles to exile
good life and charity.” Because of the false nature of the
absolutions, they said, “No tongue may tell how many souls go to

hell by these cursed captains and Anti-Christs’ jurisdictions and
censures.”
Norwich was a prelate not merely martial but actively bellicose.
Though a bishop, he was described by Walsingham as “young,
unbridled and insolent … endowed neither with learning nor
discretion, experienced neither in preserving nor bestowing
friendship.” By the time he had gathered sucient funds and a force
of about 5,000, his intended allies in Ghent were sadly subdued. He
succeeded, however, after landing at Calais, in quickly taking
Gravelines, Dunkirk, and Bourbourg on the Flemish coast. After
laying siege to Ypres without success, he turned his attentions to
Picardy, then defended by Coucy as Captain-General. Norwich
withdrew without a ght when half his force under the veteran Sir
Hugh Calveley refused to follow him farther. A greatly superior
French army having now taken the eld, Norwich hurriedly shut
himself up in Bourbourg while Calveley made for Calais. “By my
faith,” said that veteran captain in disgust, “we have made a most
shameful campaign; none so poor or so disgraceful ever issued out
of England.” Such was the result, he said, of believing “this Bishop
of Norwich who wished to y before he had wings.”
A huge French army settled down in August to the siege of
Bourbourg, entertaining each other and visiting foreign knights in
jousts and festivities of competitive splendor and valorous exploits
designed “to raise the fame of their antique nobility.” In these
activities Coucy made an impressive showing, especially for his
equestrian style. Mounted on a beautiful horse and leading several
others caparisoned in all the heraldic arms belonging to his house,
“he rode from side to side in the most graceful manner to the
delight of all who saw him, and all praised and honored him for his
great air and ne presence.” Four months passed pleasurably before
Bourbourg in very dierent mood from the ght against the
commoners of the year before. The French exhibited no ardor for
assault and, at the approach of winter, allowed the aair to be
brought to an end through some tricky mediation by the Duke of
Brittany. Norwich was bought o and went home to decit and

disgrace. England’s military repute, already declining for a decade,
sank further, supplying moralists with a text against the injustices
and oppressions of men of the sword. “God’s hand is against them,”
said Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester, “because their hand is
against God.”
Although the belligerents could not know it, the Norwich invasion
was destined to be the last of the century, though not of the war.
Combat faded without bringing settlement between England and
France any closer. Parleys began as usual after the siege of
Bourbourg, but could agree on nothing better than a nine months’
truce signed in January 1384. Coucy was not this time one of the
negotiators because he was engaged in a private war on behalf of
his future relative, the Duc de Bar, his daughter’s prospective father-
in-law, who very promptly paid him 2,000 francs to cover his
expenses. Marie’s marriage to Henri de Bar was afterward celebrated
in November.
All this time the Duchesse d’Anjou and her husband’s chancellor,
Jean le Fèvre, were imploring the Council to deliver the promised
aid. Anjou’s situation now was needier than ever because he had
been robbed by one of his own nobles of 80,000 to 100,000 francs
collected for him by his wife (or, according to other versions,
borrowed from the Visconti). The robber, who ten years later was to
commit another crime of historic consequence, was Pierre de Craon,
a knight of noble birth and large estates who had accompanied the
Duke to Italy. Sent by Anjou to fetch the money, Craon returned via
Venice where he dissipated most of it in extravagant parties,
gambling, and debauchery, supposedly from a desire to display
himself in a style suitable to the sovereign he represented. He kept
what was left and did not rejoin the Duke.
Such casual criminality against his lord seems close to incredible
unless someone interested in Anjou’s failure and powerful enough to
protect Craon from prosecution had put him up to it. That person
could only have been the Duke of Burgundy, but that he would go
so far as to ruin his brother seems far-fetched. When Craon returned
to France, however, he did escape punishment through the
protection of Burgundy to whose wife he was related.

The honor of France, in the eyes of the King and Council, could
not allow Anjou to languish in failure nor give that much comfort to
Pope Urban. In the spring of 1384, after truce was concluded with
England, and after Burgundy, on the death of his father-in-law,
entered into possession of Flanders, Coucy’s campaign of rescue was
launched at last. It was already late to save Anjou, but Coucy was
not a captain to y before he had wings. In the duel of arms and
wits he was about to wage in the heart of Italy, he showed himself
adroit, responsible, and gifted with that magic faculty of emerging
invincible from surrounding disaster.
In May before leaving, he founded, as he had before the Swiss
campaign, a perpetual daily mass for himself and his successors, this
time at the Abbey of St. Médard near Soissons, assuring him double
coverage. Toward the cost of his expedition, the crown supplied
78,000 francs, of which 8,000 were to be repaid by the Pope.
Another 4,000 was given to Coucy in compensation for the non-
payment of aids promised him in the preceding year. He assembled
an army estimated at 1,500 lances, amounting with foot soldiers and
archers to a total of about 9,000 men. Miles de Dormans, the former
Chancellor, who had been eager to go for the past year, joined with
200 lances. The bulk of the force was evidently made up by
mercenaries, partly recruited in Avignon, where Coucy went rst for
consultations with Clement.
In July he crossed the Alps by way of Mont Cenis bearing powers
to conclude the marriage by proxy of Anjou’s son and Bernabò’s
daughter. A message from Bernabò invited him to enter Milan with
200 of his highest-ranking companions, which Coucy, whether from
pomp or caution, enlarged to 600. Welcomed “with much joy” by
Bernabò outside the gates, they entered the city together, “but such
was the great number of men that they broke the bridge.” This
seems to have been Coucy’s only faux-pas and did not detract from
opulent ceremonies and a daily parade of gifts during a visit that
lasted two weeks.
Two weeks was not too long to chart a course through the
labyrinthine rivalries of Italy. The interrelationships of Venice,
Genoa, Milan, Piedmont, Florence, and assorted despots and

communes of northern Italy were constantly shifting. As soon as one
power joined another against a third for that season’s advantage, all
alliances and feuds changed partners as if in a trecento square dance.
Venice feuded with Genoa, Milan played o one against the other
and feuded with Florence and the several principalities of Piedmont,
Florence feuded with its neighbors, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, and
formed various leagues against Milan; papal politics kept the whole
mass quivering.
Coucy’s rst hazard lay underfoot in the mutual jealousy between
Bernabò and his melancholy nephew Gian Galeazzo, who now ruled
in Pavia since the death of his father in 1378. Subtle, secretive, and
deceptively mild, Gian Galeazzo cultivated a public repute for
timidity and a hidden will as strong and unprincipled as Bernabò’s.
In later years when he was better known, Francesco Carrara of
Padua said of him, “I know Gian Galeazzo. Neither honor nor pity
nor sworn faith ever yet inclined him to do a disinterested deed. If
he ever seeks what is good, it is because his interest requires it, for
he is without moral sense. Goodness, like hate or anger, is for him a
matter of calculation.” As an opponent, Carrara’s opinion was
naturally inimical but not necessarily invalid; the character it
ascribed to Gian Galeazzo anticipated by more than a century
Machiavelli’s Prince.
Gian Galeazzo resented and feared Bernabò’s intrusion on his own
prior relationship with the French royal family. “Bernabò is making
fresh alliances with France,” warned his mother. “If he becomes
related, he will seize upon your sovereignty.” With his one
remaining child against Bernabò’s well-lled stable, Gian Galeazzo
could not match his uncle in alliances. If he could not match him, he
could remove him, a cold alternative that from this moment—as
was later recognized—began to take shape in his mind.
Meanwhile, he quietly paid his share of the subsidy for Anjou and
prepared to welcome Coucy to Pavia. It was ten years since their
encounter at Montichiari which had so conrmed Gian Galeazzo’s
distaste for battle that he had never again taken the eld. But Coucy
did not appear in Pavia to renew the acquaintance, probably

because Bernabò did not wish his nephew and the French envoy to
meet.
Agitation in northern Italy was intense at news of Coucy’s advent.
Siena sent envoys secretly to Milan to bargain for support against
Florence. Florence sent envoys to divert him from Tuscany by
gracious words and protestations of friendship. Florentine
diplomacy was conducted by the permanent chancellor, Coluccio
Salutati, a cultivated scholar who could frame his foreign
correspondence in elegant Latin rhetoric that reected credit on the
republic. The continuity of his oce, which was equivalent to that
of a chief administrator, gave him great inuence, and the fact that
his appointment was regularly renewed over a period of thirty years
is evidence—given the turbulence of Florentine politics—of a man
of remarkable political ability, not to say equanimity. His heart was
in literature and the new humanism, but in the conduct of aairs he
was ecient, diligent, learned, and genial, admired for his integrity
and style. According to Gian Galeazzo, a state paper by Salutati
carried in the political scales the weight of a thousand horsemen.
This was Coucy’s opponent.
In response to the Florentine greetings, Coucy was surpassingly
gracious. “We met,” states the report probably written by Salutati,
“with joyful embraces and greetings and he spoke reassuringly and
peacefully to us. He called us not friends and brothers but his very
fathers and masters.… Not only did he promise to abstain from
hostility toward us, but he pledged to support us with his army in
our own aairs.” Coucy had clearly learned the Italian manner. He
assured the Florentines their fears were fanciful and promised to
conne his passage to a strictly limited route. They accepted his
assurances, perhaps less because they trusted them than because,
with Hawkwood absent in Naples, they did not have an armed force
capable of barring his way. Neutral but suspicious, they raised a
company of 4,000 peasants and commoners to guard the route.
Starting in August, Coucy crossed the Apennines and entered the
land of the “Tuscan miracle” on the west. Cypress stood out against
the rich blue sky, vineyards and silver olive trees clung to the
slopes. Between hills topped by castle or village, slow white oxen

moved through a landscape hand-tended for 2,000 years. The
French army penetrated harshly in a progress that was not the
peaceful one Coucy had promised. To their stupor et dolor (shock
and grief), as the Florentines afterward complained bitterly to the
King of France, they learned “he was not the same toward us in his
heart as he outwardly feigned.” Partly as a form of intimidation to
remind Florence to stay neutral, partly to pay and provision his
mercenaries, Coucy exacted tribute from towns, looted villages,
even seized castles. Florence sent more envoys crying, “Peace!
Peace!” and oering rich gifts and further assurance of neutrality if
he would bypass Florentine territory. Coucy continued to answer
soothingly, but force once employed quickly became rapine, dicult
to restrain.
“They not only stole geese and hens, robbed the dovecotes and
made o with sheep, rams, and cattle,” according to the Florentine
complaint, “they actually stormed our unarmed walls and
undefended homes as if they were at war with us. They took people
captive and tortured them and forced them to pay ransom. They
killed men and women in cruel ways and set re to their empty
houses.”
As Coucy advanced, Florence learned with dismay that he was in
communication with the exiled lords of Arezzo, an ancient and
important hill town forty miles to the southeast which the
Florentines had long coveted and were preparing to annex. Its
history dated back to the Etruscans, its famous red glazed pottery to
the Romans; from its cluster of towers with belvederes and
balconies, St. Francis in Giotto’s painting exorcised ying demons.
In the strife of Guelfs and Ghibellines, its ruling family, the Tarlati,
lords of Pietramala, had been overthrown in 1380, and the winning
side, too weak to maintain control, had called in the help of Charles
of Durazzo. He or his agents treated Arezzo as a conquered city
subject to the usual sack and nes of inhabitants, who in
consequence looked more favorably on Florence. After complex
bargaining, the Florentines had all but concluded an arrangement to
buy the city from Durazzo when Coucy’s intervention threatened to
wreck all their hopes. They learned that the exiled lords of

Pietramala had oered to assist him in capturing the city and that
he had concluded a treaty with them to that eect. Coucy’s object
was to gain a foothold for the Angevin cause and a position from
which he could exert pressure on Florence for supplies. If he drew
against himself Hawkwood’s company from Naples, the forces
opposing Anjou would thereby be weakened.
Between Coucy and Florence a duel now began. Approaching his
goal, Coucy made heavier demands and gave fewer reassurances. In
reply to a renewed Florentine protest against pillaging by his
soldiers, he blamed it on the resistance of the inhabitants, and with
cool arrogance demanded a tribute of 25,000 orins from Florence
and 20,000 from Siena. The Signoria met in anxiety; some argued
for paying, some for refusing, some for a token payment to maintain
the façade of friendship and prevent assault by Coucy’s men-at-
arms. While sending forward envoys with various proposals,
Florence warned Jacopo Carraciolo, the governor of Arezzo who
was now in their pay, to fortify his walls, prepare to provision
Florentine reinforcements when they should appear, and expect
attack on September 18. With generous sums contributed by the
bourgeois magnates, they began assembling an armed force.
For a week, while waiting the outcome of his demands, Coucy
remained in the vicinity without advancing. Siena paid him 7,000
orins; Florence, without making refusal explicit, paid nothing. As if
satised, Coucy resumed his march, but, instead of making for
Arezzo, took the road southward toward Cortona. This diversion
proved to be a ruse to relax the vigilance of Carraciolo. On the night
of September 28–29, Coucy turned back toward Arezzo and, on
reaching the city, divided his force in two groups. He sent one to
assault the walls with great clamor and shouts, while he led the
stronger section with his best knights silently around to the San
Clemente gate on the other side. Crashing down the doors, the
French poured through, crying, “Long live King Louis and the Sire
de Coucy! Death to Guelfs and the Duke of Durazzo!” As
Carraciolo’s men-at-arms rushed to meet them, battle cries and
clang of blows lled the city, combat surged through every street
and around the old Roman amphitheater until the defenders gave

way before superior numbers and retreated to the citadel. The lords
of Pietramala regained their homes in triumph, and while Arezzo
again suered rape and pillage, Coucy claimed the city in the name
of King Louis of Naples, Sicily, and Jerusalem.
At that moment Louis of Anjou had been dead for nine days. For a
year and a half he had rusted in the heel of Italy, with no kingship
but the title, while his army wasted and dwindled and some who
could aord it took ship for home. With control of Bari and other
coast towns on the Adriatic, he could be provisioned by sea and may
not have been as entirely destitute as pictured by the monastic
chroniclers who liked to enlarge on the theme of vainglory’s fall.
But he was immobilized for lack of funds. His impoverished knights
rode on donkeys or marched on foot “to hasten the day of combat”
but could nd nothing more than occasional skirmishes. In
September 1384, Anjou caught a severe chill after overexerting
himself against looters in his army. Fever developed, and
recognizing death’s presence, the Duke, like his brother Charles V,
completed his will on his last day. The dying seemed always to
know when their hour was at hand, doubtless because cures were
not expected and the onset of certain symptoms was recognized as
fatal. How it happened that they were so often in condition at the
end to dictate last wills or codicils is harder to explain, unless it was
because dying was an organized ritual with many attendants to
assist the process.
With passion for conquest undiminished, Anjou called in his will
on Pope Clement to ensure that his son, Louis II, should succeed to
the Kingdom of Naples, and on Charles VI to “brandish the sword of
his incomparable power” to avenge Queen Joanna. He appointed
Coucy as his viceroy to carry on the campaign, with a provision that
he could not be removed except by order of the Duchesse d’Anjou
conrmed by the King, Burgundy, and Berry. He died on September
20 in the castle of Bari in a room overlooking the sea. While his
body in a lead con was shipped back to France for burial, and his
forces disintegrated, Charles of Durazzo held funeral services
suitable to his late rival’s rank, and clothed his court in mourning.

Anjou’s death was not yet known on the Arno when Florence was
stunned to learn of Coucy’s capture of Arezzo. The Balia or Council
of Ten, appointed in times of crisis, hastily assembled. Letters and
ambassadors were dispatched to Genoa, Bologna, Padua, Perugia,
Verona, Naples, even to Milan, urging all to join Florence in a
league against the invader whose presence was said to endanger all
Italy. Hawkwood’s company was summoned from Naples and Pope
Urban was asked to levy a special tithe on the clergy for funds to
drive the “schismatics” out of Italy and thwart the triumph of the
Anti-Pope. In the midst of the furor, news arrived by way of Venice
that the French claimant to Naples was dead. Florence rejoiced and
redoubled her preparations to surround Coucy in Arezzo.
Unaware both of the storm rising around him and of Anjou’s
death, Coucy took pleasure in informing the Signoria of his capture
of Arezzo, not doubting, he wrote smoothly, that they would be
delighted by an event so happy for the partisans of King Louis. With
even greater pleasure, the Signoria wrote back to the “illustrious
lord and dearest friend” to inform him with “a great sting of grief”
that Anjou had died and that several of his chief companions had
already appeared in Venice on their way home. Coucy naturally did
not believe it, suspecting a Florentine trick intended to discourage
him.
To impress the inhabitants, he established himself in splendid
style and set himself to win adherents for the Angevin claimant by
keeping open table and receiving with largesse all comers who
declared themselves partisans of his cause. But while besieging the
citadel, he shortly became aware that he was being enveloped if not
actually besieged himself by a Florentine force on the north and his
former companion-in-arms, Sir John Hawkwood, on the south. At
this juncture the purpose of his campaign collapsed when evidence
reached him conrming the fact of Anjou’s death.
Coucy discovered himself isolated in the center of Italy with no
expectation of relief and no point in holding out. Rather, his
problem was getting out. To have clung to Arezzo for the sake of
pursuing the Angevin cause in obedience to Anjou’s will would have
been correct but doomed. Messages from a remainder of Anjou’s

followers urged him to enter the kingdom of Naples and be its
Governor, but Coucy was not the knightly type of heroic fool either
to march unthinking toward disaster or to accept it with brainless
valor when it came. He meant to use his hold of Arezzo to extract
himself without loss of prestige to the Angevin cause—and recover
the cost of the campaign as well.
Siena, which had refused to join the Florentine league, was his
lever. He oered to sell Arezzo to Siena for 20,000 orins, knowing
that rivalry would force Florence to oer a better price including a
safe-conduct through Tuscany. Florence had not recruited any very
rm support for her league, owing to the fears of other states that
she would use it for her own aggrandizement. Bernabò, in the
interests of his French alliance, had advised regaining Arezzo by
money rather than force and warned Florence that the King of
France and his uncles might take harsh reprisals against Florentine
merchants and bankers if Coucy were attacked.
Florence, too, knew when to put discretion before valor. Through
Coucy, her prospect of acquiring Arezzo was now suddenly restored.
Overtures were made for the surrender of Carraciolo, the city’s
governor, including an oer to pay the back wages of his men-at-
arms. Given the prospect of pay which they had thought lost,
Carraciolo’s men let it be known to their chief that they were ready
to abandon a useless resistance. Accordingly, he agreed to surrender
on condition that Florence recompense him for damages suered in
defending the city. No combat without money was standard for the
age of chivalry.
Because Florence had prepared to use armed force against Coucy,
contrary to her promise of neutrality, she was concerned about
possible reprisals by France. To forestall these, the Signoria
addressed to Charles VI a voluminous recital of Coucy’s
wrongdoings: the pillaging and injuries, the demands for tribute, the
dealing with rebels (the Pietramala) in Florentine territory. In
sorrow, the letter told how, after feigning peaceful intentions, Coucy
had acted in hostility like an enemy, how “we, even though
unaccustomed to deceitful words, saw through his plans” and were
saddened that “such a noble and high-minded man, especially of

Gallic blood, whose proper and natural virtue is magnanimity, could
allow himself to invent lies and set traps”; how, in the belief that he
could not truly represent the King of France by such conduct, “we
prepared an army to repel force by force”; how, nally, “we write
this with grief and bitterness so that you may know that our actions
are justied.”
Having put that on the record, the republic reached amicable
arrangements with Coucy in two skillfully drafted separate treaties
of November 5. In the rst, Enguerrand de Coucy, desirous of
recognizing and recompensing the aection, devotion, and respect
always shown by the Republic of Florence to the royal house of
France, ceded Arezzo, its walls, fortresses, houses, furnishings,
inhabitants, rights, and privileges to Florence in perpetuity. No
mention of a consideration was made, in order that the treaty might
appear purely as an act of policy by Coucy in the Angevin interest
against Durazzo. He made it a condition that the Pietramala were to
be restored to their properties, that Florence was to remain neutral
with regard to Naples, that French envoys and messengers to Naples
would be aorded free passage with the right to buy provisions, and
that he and his men should enjoy the same conditions on returning
to France.
The sum agreed on in the second treaty was twice what he had
asked from Siena. Considering the great cost to the Sire de Coucy of
taking the city of Arezzo, and considering that he had traversed
Florentine territory “without causing damage” (Florence was
exible in these matters) and intended to depart in the same
manner, the republic agreed to pay him 40,000 gold orins, of
which three fourths were to be paid at once before cession of the
city, and the remaining 10,000 either at Bologna, Pisa, or Florence
according to his wish, within two weeks after his evacuation of
Arezzo. In generous disposal of the citizens’ property, the French
were permitted to take away with them whatever they could carry
on the day of departure.
For preserving appearances while gaining desired ends, the
settlement was a diplomatic masterpiece. The losers were Durazzo,
who was forced to accept an accomplished fact; the Pietramala,

who, having expected to regain power, were enraged; and the
people of Arezzo, whom nobody recompensed. In revenge, on the
day of departure the Pietramala ambushed a French foraging party
and lured others “into their homes by oers of food and afterward
killed them.” Coucy at once demanded punitive action by Florence
to prove that such hostilities “are gravely displeasing to you and the
friendship between us stands rm.” Florence oered fulsome regrets
and, in lieu of action, an artistic denunciation of the “detestable”
Pietramala. Their family name, Tarlati, it was said, derived from a
word meaning “rotten wood that has been gnawed by insect borers,”
while the name Pietramala, deriving from pietra meaning stone,
suited them equally “for they are hard and unyielding in their
crimes.” With these colorful if not helpful remarks the duel between
Florence and Coucy came to an end.
Mutual obligations were carried out. Florence paid 30,000 orins
on November 15 and 17, Carraciolo surrendered on the 18th, Coucy
evacuated Arezzo on the 20th. Avoiding the hostile populace he
would have encountered by returning the way he had come, he
crossed the mountains and returned along the eastern slope to
Bologna, posting rear-guard units on the way to present the
appearance of a victor’s return. At Bologna on Christmas Day he
received the nal payment in full. He re-entered Avignon in January
1385, adding a passage over the Alps in midwinter to a remarkably
scatheless record.
Coucy’s gift, unusual for his time, was recognition of realities, as
seen in the contrast between his conduct of an expeditionary force
and Anjou’s. The quest for the crown of Naples—however harshly
judged by critics after the fact—was not necessarily destined for
catastrophe. Anjou had as good a chance as and a better claim than
his opponent. What defeated him was a late start, poor generalship,
and a waste of time and resources on the ceremonial display of
kingship before the thing itself was in hand. If he had led a rapid
and spartan advance with all energies and resources applied to the

objective, the outcome could well have been dierent. But the “if”
asks for a modern attitude in a medieval age.
The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking,
which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running
through the 14th century. The funds contributed by the crown and
by Anjou himself, not to mention the sum stolen by Pierre de Craon,
were squeezed from the people of France for a cause which could in
no way, present or future, benet them. This did not escape notice,
nor soothe the popular mood. On hearing of Anjou’s death, a tailor
of Orléans named Guillaume le Jupponnier, when “overcome with
wine,” burst into a tirade in which can be heard the rarely recorded
voice of his class. “What did he go there for, this Duke of Anjou,
down there where he went? He has pillaged and robbed and carried
o money to Italy in order to conquer another land. He is dead and
damned, and the King St. Louis too, like the others. Filth, lth of a
King and a King! We have no King but God. Do you think they got
honestly what they have? They tax me and re-tax me and it hurts
them that they can’t have everything we own. Why should they take
from me what I earn with my needle? I would rather the King and
all kings were dead than that my son should be hurt in his little
nger.”
The record of the tailor’s case states that his words expressed
“what others dared not say.” After arrest and imprisonment, he was
pardoned by the Governor of Orléans.
Anjou’s widow, born Marie of Brittany, a daughter of the saintly if
ruthless Charles of Blois and his unyielding wife, pursued the crown
of Naples on behalf of her son Louis II with the same strenuous
pertinacity as her parents had pursued the dukedom of Brittany, and
with no better results. In a life-long contest against Charles of
Durazzo and his son, Louis II was no more successful than his father
had been. While Naples passed to the rule of Aragon and then to the
Spanish Bourbons, the Angevins persevered in their claim for two
centuries with all the undismayed persistence of royalty in pursuit
of a crown denied.

The other French aim in Italy—imposing Clement by force-though
never attempted by Anjou, was not abandoned. Rather it became an
increasing obsession. In the meantime, madness shadowed Pope
Urban as he quarreled fatally with Charles of Durazzo and was
driven from Naples. Employing mercenaries, he rampaged through
Italy in ceaseless disputes, besieged and besieging, captive and
rescued, sputtering anathemas and excommunications, dragging
behind him the six captive cardinals whom he accused of conspiracy
to put him under restraint. When the horse of one of them went
lame, Urban had the unfortunate prelate put to death and his corpse
left unburied by the roadside. Afterward he executed four of the
remaining ve. He did not grace the Church of Rome.
Pierre de Craon returned to France after Anjou’s death, disposing
of obvious riches. While many of his recent companions, remnants
of Anjou’s army, begged their way on foot out of Italy, he appeared
at court with a magnicent retinue, exciting indignation. “Ha! False
traitor,” cried the Duc de Berry on seeing him enter the Council,
“wicked and disloyal, you deserve death! It is you who caused my
brother’s death. Seize him, and let justice be done!” No one dared
carry out the command in fear of Craon’s Burgundy connection.
Craon continued to ornament the court of Charles VI and to escape
for a long time a relentless lawsuit by the Duchesse d’Anjou and her
son, although ultimately he was ordered to pay back 100,000 francs.
Ironically, after escaping harm in Italy, Coucy suered a fall from
his horse in Avignon with serious injury to his leg. Possibly a
compound fracture, it was severe enough to keep him conned to
bed for nearly four months. As Anjou’s viceroy, he took
responsibility for the ragged veterans returning from Bari,
distributing funds and mediating disputes. On the arrival of Anjou’s
widow to establish her son’s claims in Provence, he visited her
several times (presumably in a litter), advised her in the matter of
Pierre de Craon, and “comforted her as best he could.” During these
visits he may well have met and talked with the author of one of the
great commentaries of the 14th century.
Honoré Bonet, Benedictine Prior of Salon in Provence, was
attached in some capacity to the Anjou household and living in

Avignon during the years 1382–86 while writing his observations on
the kind of experience in which Coucy was an actor. The Tree of
Battles was an examination of the laws and customs of war and,
inevitably, of its moral and social eects. His purpose in writing the
book, Bonet stated, was to nd an answer to the “great commotions
and very erce misdeeds” of his own time. His conclusion was
blunt. Stated in the form of a question—“Whether this world can by
nature be without conict and at peace?”—his answer was, “No, it
can by no means be so.”
“I make a Tree of Mourning at the beginning of my book,” he
wrote, on which could be seen three things: the “tribulation such as
never was before” of the schism; the “great dissension” among
Christian princes and kings; and the “great grief and discord” among
communities. Bonet examined many practical and moral questions—
whether, if a man is captured while under safe-conduct, the
guarantor is bound to ransom him at his own cost; whether a man
should prefer death to ight from battle; what were a knight’s rights
to wages, including sick pay and pay while on leave; what were the
rules of spoil. Through every discussion his governing idea was that
war should not harm those who do not make war, while every
example of his own time showed that it did. He is “heart-stricken to
see and hear of the misery inicted on poor laborers … through
whom, under God, the Pope and all the kings and lords in the world
have their meat and all their drink and clothing.” In answer to the
question whether it is permissible to take prisoner the “merchants,
tillers of the soil, and shepherds” of the enemy, his answer was no:
“All husbandmen and plowmen with their oxen when they are
carrying on their business” and any ass, mule, or horse harnessed to
a plow should have immunity “by reason of the work they do.” The
reason was fundamental: security of the laborer and his beasts
benets all because they work for all.
Bonet reected the growing dismay at the “great grief and
discord” caused by daily violation of this principle. Monks like
himself and poets like Deschamps deplored openly the conduct of
war not because they were necessarily more sensitive than other
men but because they were articulate and accustomed to commit

ideas to writing. With no illusions about chivalry, Bonet wrote that
some knights were made bold by desire for glory, others by fear,
others by “greed to gain riches and for no other reason.” When The
Tree of Battles, dedicated to Charles VI, appeared in 1387, he did not
suer for its truths. On the contrary, he was invited to court and
appointed to pensions and positions. Like other prophets, his fate
was to be honored—and ignored.

The name Sicily remained attached to the Kingdom of Naples, causing
confusion which should be resolutely ignored.

In 1388 Giovanni de Mussi of Piacenza stated that a household of nine with
two horses required a minimum income of 300 orins a year. In 1415 a
wealthy Italian citizen spent 574 orins on his marriage celebration. A well-
paid artisan at about this time earned approximately eighteen orins a year.

Chapter 20

W
A Second Norman Conquest
hile Coucy was still in Avignon, his diplomatic talents
were assigned the delicate task of informing Pope
Clement of the proposed marital alliance of the King of
France to a house on the other side of the schism. The
prospective bride was Elizabeth of Bavaria—or Isabeau, as she
became known by the French equivalent of her name—a member of
the Wittelsbach dynasty and a granddaughter to Bernabò Visconti.
Bavaria, like all the German states, had remained in obedience to
Urban, to the bitter disappointment of Charles V. A German
marriage was nevertheless important to give weight against
England, especially since Richard II was negotiating to marry Anne
of Bohemia, daughter of the late Emperor.
Bavaria was the most powerful and ourishing of the German
states, and the Wittelsbachs the wealthiest of the three families—the
others being the Hapsburgs and the Luxemburgs—which at dierent
times occupied the imperial throne. A Wittelsbach alliance was so
desirable that Bernabò Visconti married no fewer than four of his
children to scions of that house. Taddea, the second of these,
bringing a dowry of 100,000 gold ducats, married Duke Stephen III
of Bavaria, who, though he ruled jointly with two brothers,
possessed every quality of the autocrat to excess. Reckless, prodigal,
ostentatious, amorous, restless without a tournament or a war, he
was well suited to a Visconti daughter, and when she died after
twelve years of marriage, her sister Maddalena, with another dowry
of 100,000 ducats, took her place. Isabeau, product of the rst
union, was in 1385 a pretty, plump fteen-year-old German maiden
destined for a lurid career.
Her marriage to Charles VI was rst broached when her uncle,
Duke Frederick, came to share in the pleasures of French chivalry at

the siege of Bourbourg. He learned that a condition of betrothal to
the King of France was that the prospective bride be examined in
the nude by ladies of the court to determine if she were properly
formed for bearing children. Conveyed to his excitable brother, the
proposal was indignantly rejected. What if she should be sent back?
Duke Stephen demanded, and instantly tossed aside the oered
crown. The alliance, however, was tactfully pursued by his uncle,
Albert of Bavaria, ruler of Hainault-Holland, and by the Duke of
Burgundy on the occasion of the famed double wedding of their
sons and daughters. Stephen’s consent was obtained by arranging
that Isabeau should be sent to France on pretext of a pilgrimage,
although Stephen warned his brother, who was to escort her, that if
he brought her back, “You will have no more bitter enemy than I.”
Rumors of the planned marriage, on reaching Milan, provoked the
most sensational coup of the age—the ousting of Bernabò by his
supposedly quiet and retiring nephew Gian Galeazzo. Bernabò’s
marriage policy had for some time been cutting into Gian Galeazzo’s
sovereignty, owing to Bernabò’s habit of giving away, as dowries,
Visconti territories or their revenues to which the nephew had equal
title—and without consulting him. The prospect of Bernabò’s
granddaughter on the throne of France, and a renewed prospect of
Bernabò’s daughter Lucia on the throne of Naples, threatened to cut
into Gian Galeazzo’s French support. Lucia reappeared when the
Duchesse d’Anjou, who had never ceased nagging her French
relatives to try once more for Naples, succeeded in obtaining a
tentative promise “in favor” of the attempt, and accordingly sent for
Lucia to complete the proxy marriage to her son. This combination
of circumstances propelled Gian Galeazzo to action.
In May 1385 he sent a message to his uncle saying that he was
about to make a pilgrimage to the Madonna del Monte near Lago
Maggiore and would be glad to meet with him outside Milan. His
proposal seemed natural enough because Gian Galeazzo, though
“subtle in intellect and wise in the ways of the world,” was very
devout, carrying a rosary and accompanied by monks wherever he
went, and greatly concerned with penance and pilgrimage. He also
relied on astrologers to select propitious moments for his decisions,

and once refused to discuss a diplomatic matter at a particular time
because, as he wrote his correspondent, “I observe astrology in all
my aairs.” These tastes and his apparent fear of his uncle, shown
by doubling his guard and having all his food tasted, caused
Bernabò to regard him with contempt. When a courtier, suspicious
of Gian Galeazzo’s message, warned of a possible plot, Bernabò
scoed. “You have little sense. I tell you I know my nephew.” At age
76, after a lifetime of bullying, he was both overcondent and
careless. Gian Galeazzo’s plan depended on just that.
With two of his sons, but otherwise unprotected, Bernabò rode to
the rendezvous outside the gates. Gian Galeazzo, accompanied by a
large bodyguard, dismounted, embraced his uncle and, while
holding him tightly, called out an order in German, upon which one
of his generals, the condottiero Jacopo del Verme, cut Bernabo’s
sword belt while another, crying “You are a prisoner!”, seized his
baton of oce and took him in custody. Immediately Gian
Galeazzo’s forces galloped through Milan and occupied its strong
points. Because of his reasonable government of Pavia, the populace
was ready to welcome him as a deliverer, and greeted him with
cries of “Viva il Conte!” followed by their rst thought on removal of
the tyrant, “Down with taxes!” To smooth the transition, Gian
Galeazzo allowed the mob to sack Bernabò’s palace and burn the tax
registers. He reduced taxes as one of his rst measures and made up
the dierence from Bernabò’s hoard of gold. Legitimacy or its
appearance was supplied by summoning a Grand Council to endow
him with formal dominion and by sending a legal transcript of
Bernabò’s crimes to all states and rulers.
The Milanese state was now controlled by a single ruler who was
to loom ever larger as time went on. Bernabò’s sons were
neutralized, in the case of one by life imprisonment, in the case of
the second by his own worthlessness, and by a lifetime pension for
the third and youngest. The towns of Lombardy submitted
uneventfully, and the tyrant himself was locked up in the fortress of
Trezzo, where in December of the same year he died, supposedly
poisoned by order of the usurper. Bernabò was buried in Milan with

honors although without the baton of oce, and his equestrian
statue, already made at his design, was erected as he had planned.
The fall of the modern Tarquin amazed the world, with echoes
reaching into the Canterbury Tales, where it is related in the “Monk’s
Tale” how “Thy brother’s son … within his prison made thee to
dye.” Not the least of the consequences was to implant in the
shallow if implacable heart of Isabeau of Bavaria a relentless desire
for revenge upon Gian Galeazzo who had deposed, if not murdered
the grandfather she had doubtless never known. Since the usurper
was to emerge as one of the major gures of Europe and she as
Queen of France, the results were grave and far-reaching.
At seventeen, Charles VI was an ardent, inconstant youth who
rode nine courses in the lists at the tournaments in honor of the
Burgundydouble wedding. His martial appetite had been
encouraged by his uncles for the sake of war in their own interests.
Physically, “nature seemed to have been prodigal in her gifts” to
him. Above average height, robust in gure, wearing his blond hair
to his shoulder, he was frank, energetic, gracious, carelessly and
excessively generous, giving to anyone and everyone regardless of
what was in his Treasury, lacking in steadiness or seriousness.
During a hunt when he was thirteen, a deer was reportedly taken
wearing a golden collar inscribed in “ancient characters”: Caesar hoc
mihi donavit. Told that the deer must have been in the forest since
the days of Julius Caesar “or some other emperor,” the boy King
was so enchanted that he ordered all the royal plate and other
furnishings to be engraved with a deer wearing a collar in the form
of a crown. No less easily inamed in amours, he was the victim,
according to the Monk of St. Denis, of “carnal appetites,” and was
equally quickly disenchanted. Instability trembled beneath outward
health. His mother, Queen Jeanne, had suered a phase of insanity
in 1373, his heritage was a web of intermarriage, all his sisters but
one had died before maturity.
The charm of Isabeau and the delights of marriage were suitably
dwelt upon by his various aunts and uncles at the resplendent

double wedding of Burgundy’s son and daughter at Cambrai in April
1385. As a prince of great pretensions, Philip intended the ceremony
to outshine any that had gone before. He borrowed the crown jewels
from Charles VI, transported extra tapestries and special jousting
horses from Paris, ordered special liveries made for the occasion of
red and green velvet (the two most expensive colors), furnished all
the ladies with gowns of cloth of gold, and supplied a thousand
jousting lances for the tournament. Papal dispensations of
consanguinity were obtained in duplicate, one from each Pope
because the marriages spanned the schism. Gifts were distributed
throughout festivities that lasted ve days, and their cost was twice
that of the clothes. The total cost was 112,000 livres, equal to one
quarter the revenues of the Flemish-Burgundian state in a time of
deep social anger and want.
Isabeau reached France in July after being tutored for four weeks,
at the court of her Wittelsbach relatives in Hainault, in French dress,
etiquette, and irtation. The meeting with Charles took place at
Amiens, where the French court had moved owing to renewed war
in Flanders. The King, in a fever of excitement, arrived on July 13,
the same day that Coucy arrived from Avignon “in great haste with
news of the Pope,” although what news is not recorded. Sleepless
and agitated, Charles kept asking, “When will I see her?” and when
he did, fell instantly enamored, gazing at the German girl with
admiration and ardor. Asked if she was to become Queen of France,
he replied forcefully, “By my faith, yes!”
Isabeau understood nothing of what was being said because her
lessons had apparently left her innocent of the French language
except for a few words spoken in a thick German accent. Her
manner, however, was alluring, and Charles’s impatience was such
that the wedding followed hastily on July 17 to the accompaniment
of numerous jokes about the hot young couple. “And if,” concluded
Froissart, “they passed that night together in great delight, one can
well believe it.” No such eager marriage was ever to sink to a sadder
end, in madness, debauchery, and hate.
After Venus, Mars. Even before the truce with England was due to
expire in October, the Scots had sent envoys to ask for a French

force to join them “and make so great a hole in England that it
should never be recovered.” The pride of France welcomed the
chance to show themselves not only strong enough to repel attack
but ready to take the oensive. The English should be shown that
they could not always be the aggressor but must “get accustomed
themselves to being attacked”—in their own land, as Coucy had
suggested to Charles V. Philip the Bold, who eectively controlled
the government, arranged for Admiral de Vienne, “a knight of
proven valor and a passion for glory,” to take an expeditionary force
to Scotland and prepare the way for a larger force to follow, which
would be led by Clisson, Sancerre, and Coucy. Then, together with
the Scots, they would “boldly penetrate” over the border.
Commanding eighty knights and a total force of 1,500 fully paid
for six months in advance, Vienne crossed in the early summer of
1385, bringing a “free gift” of 50,000 gold francs to the King of
Scotland and fty suits of armor, including lances and shields, to his
nobles. The Scottish envoys had indeed asked the French to bring
equipment to arm a thousand Scots, which should have been a
warning, but the realities of Scotland proved an unpleasant surprise.
Castles were bare and gloomy with primitive conditions and few
comforts in a miserable climate. The damp stone huts of clan
chieftains were worse, lacking windows or chimneys, lled with
peat smoke and the smell of manure. Their inhabitants engaged in
prolonged vendettas of organized cattle-raiding, wife-stealing,
betrayal, and murder. They had no iron to shoe their horses nor
leather for saddles and bridles, which previously had been imported
ready-made from Flanders.
Accustomed to “tapestried halls, goodly castles, and soft beds,”
the French asked themselves, “Why have we come hither? We never
knew what poverty meant until now.” Their hosts were no better
pleased with the visitors. They resented the luxury-loving French
knights and welcomed them coldly. Instead of marching toward
pitched battle with banners ying, they withdrew their forces when
they learned that a large English army was advancing.
Diverted by a new outbreak in Flanders, the French army of
reinforcement did not come. During enforced idleness, Admiral de

Vienne’s frustrated martial ardor turned to love; he engaged in a
guilty amour with a cousin of the Scottish King which enraged his
hosts “so that the Admiral was in danger of death.” Whether the
nal quarrel was over this issue or because the Scots insisted that
the French should pay the cost of their visit, the Admiral in any case
undertook to bear the cost personally, hurriedly hired a number of
ships, and departed.
Meanwhile, the party of Ghent, led by Artevelde’s successor
Francis Ackerman, had seized Damme, the port of Bruges at the
mouth of the Scheldt where the French reinforcements for Scotland
were to have been launched. The attack was prompted by the
English, who were suering the usual terrors spread by rumors of a
French invasion. A French army, bringing the King fresh from his
marriage bed, marched north to besiege Damme and, though
suering much from the heat, from English archers, and from an
outbreak of plague, recaptured it after a siege of six weeks.
Punishment was savage, chiey by the Burgundians, who burned
and destroyed up to the gates of Ghent. Many prisoners, taken for
ransom, were put to death to serve as an example. One of them at
the block warned his executioners that “the King can kill men of
strong heart, but though he exterminates all Flemings their dry
bones will rise up to ght him again.” The point was borne in upon
the Duke of Burgundy that alienation of his own subjects was not in
his best interests. A peace settlement without further penalties or
nes was concluded in December at Tournai and eorts made
afterward to restore Flanders’ damaged commerce. But the harm
done by decades of strife could not be undone; the great age of
Flemish prosperity had passed.
Possibly stimulated by all the weddings, Coucy’s remarriage at the
age of 46 to a girl some thirty years his junior took place in
February 1386. The bride was Isabelle, daughter of the Duc de
Lorraine, “a very beautiful demoiselle of the noble and great
generation of the house of Blois.” She had been considered as a
bride for the King during the interval when Stephen of Bavaria was

recalcitrant, and was described as “of the King’s age or very close,”
which would have made her sixteen to eighteen. Charles had been
“near agreed” to the match until the Bavarian proposal was revived.
Little is known of the second Isabelle de Coucy except that after
the marriage Enguerrand undertook a vast renovation of the castle
from which it is possible (though not obligatory) to deduce that he
did it to please a young and beautiful bride.
Following the marriage, a new northwest wing almost as
grandiose in scale as the renowned donjon was added to the castle,
along with many domestic improvements.* The new wing housed a
grand banquet hall measuring 50 by 200 feet, called the Salle des
Preux or Hall of the Nine Worthies, the heroes of history most
admired in the Middle Ages. They were three ancients—Hector of
Troy, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar; three Biblical Jews—
Joshua, King David, and Judas Maccabeus; three Christians—King
Arthur, Charlemagne, and the crusader Godfrey of Bouillon. An
adjoining hall 30 by 60 feet, was dedicated to the feminine
worthies, Hippolyta, Semiramis, Penthisilea, and other legendary
queens. Each hall had an immense mantled chimney at either end, a
high vaulted ceiling, and wide arched windows which let in broad
bands of sunlight, unlike the narrow slits in the older walls. A raised
tribune from which great personages and their ladies, separated
from the crowd, could view the dances and entertainments was built
into the Salle des Preux. Behind it stood the row of Nine Worthies in
bas-relief, “carved by a hand so ne,” wrote an admirer, “that if my
eyes had not been witness I would never have believed that leaves
and fruits and grapes and other delicate things could have been so
perfectly fashioned in hard stone.”
Among other additions were a replace and chimney for the
lady’s boudoir, now tucked into an angle between the new wing and
the old; an indoor tennis court with carved wooden ceiling; a new
stable in the lower court; parapets extended the length of the
terraces; a double-arched space beneath the terrace to keep wood
for fuel; a kennel with latrines “to make room for Bonniface and
Guedon to lie”; a water tank six feet by eight and sixteen feet deep

to supply water by four large stone conduits to the kitchens. New
wooden ceilings were installed in the donjon, roofs throughout the
castle were re-covered, gargoyles and gutters cleaned, and the
windows of the upper chamber “which the Dame de Coucy’s
monkey had damaged” repaired.
Craftsmen of every specialty were hired—a carriage-maker to cut
down the carriage brought from Lorraine by the new Dame de
Coucy, which was too wide for the gates and had to be reduced by a
foot; wood-carvers to panel the ceilings of the Eagle Chamber and
the oratory and dressing room of the Sire de Coucy, and to make
two extension leaves for the banquet table for the new hall; iron-
workers to replace old keys, locks, bolts, and hinges, in particular to
make a new lock for the casket in the oratory of the Seigneur;
plumbers to weld the kitchen sinks and drainage pipes; painters
from Paris to decorate the walls and “to redress the white-and-red
hoods of the Coucy livery with new quilting.”
Much of the non-rented land, it appears from the accounts, was in
vineyards, requiring considerable expense in planting, cultivating,
and harvesting, and producing considerable income for the
Seigneur. Other expenses went for the wages of bailis and tax-
collectors, oerings to the chaplains of two chapels, charges for
curing sh, replenishing livestock, cutting wood, mowing and
haying the elds, providing the clothes and equipment of the
Seigneur and his retinue. Coucy’s journeys to Soissons and other
places show him generally accompanied by about eighty mounted
knights, squires, and servants, and an astronomer, Maître Guillaume
de Verdun, to carry out “certain necessities for him.”
The second marriage like the rst was not very prolic, which
may reect something about Enguerrand’s marital relations or
merely his prolonged absences. No son to carry on the dynasty and
maintain the great barony was born, and only one daughter. Named
Isabelle for her mother, she ultimately married the second son of the
Duke of Burgundy. At an unknown date, probably some years later,
the much desired son was nally born to Enguerrand—out of
wedlock. Named Perceval and known as the Bastard of Coucy, he
married in 1419 which suggests that he was the product of a late

liaison. The identity of his mother is a blank. She may have been a
rival of Coucy’s wife or a substitute during his later tenure in the
south as Lieutenant-General of Guienne. Evidently she was of some
importance in Coucy’s life, or he felt pride in a son, or both, because
he acknowledged paternity and endowed Perceval with the
seigneurie of Aubermont, a ef of the lordship of La Fère. The
Bastard could thereafter call himself Sieur de Coucy and Seigneur
d’Aubermont.
In the year of marriages, 1385–86, Coucy attended the wedding at
Dijon of his Hapsburg relative and recent enemy, Duke Albert III, to
a daughter of Philip the Bold. This was the year of the historic
victory at Sempach when Swiss pikemen defeated the Hapsburgs,
and it maybe that Coucy’s presence at Dijon for the wedding was
connected with the Hapsburgs’ desire for his support. In any event,
his quarrel with his mother’s family was apparently made up. “They
ended always by accommodating,” in the words of the discoverer of
the document.
The Scottish asco failed to discourage French designs for the
oensive. On the contrary, the design was now enlarged to a full-
scale invasion of England, a true penetration, perhaps a second
Norman Conquest. There was a strong body of sentiment which held
that only a military victory by the French could nish o the war
and assure the supremacy of the French Pope. Besides, England was
known to be in great discord, and the nobility no longer united in
support of the King but deeply disaected. The Duke of Burgundy
was initially the sponsor of the invasion plan, but when the decision
was taken in April 1386, the Royal Council voted for it
unanimously. Many were the same men who had served Charles V,
but his controlling sense of the art of the possible was gone. Out of
the “heap of ruins” after Poitiers, Charles had learned the discipline
of adjusting ambitions to possibilities; his son’s reign was to be
spent unlearning it as fast as possible. A folie de grandeur, or just
such “fantasies of omnipotence” as dene megalomania, overtook
the French as a distraught century was drawing to its close.

“You are the greatest King living with the greatest number of
subjects,” Burgundy told his nephew, “and it has occurred to me
many times why we do not make this passage to England to crush
the great pride of these English … and make this great enterprise
one of eternal memory.” When shortly after Easter the Duke of
Lancaster left England with a large force in 200 ships to conquer the
throne of Castile, the French opportunity was at hand. Information
about each other’s movements was known through French and
English shermen, who, ignoring hostilities, came to each other’s
aid at sea and exchanged catches, keeping trans-Channel
communication open.
The French invasion eet was planned to be the greatest “since
God created the world.” The original army that Clisson and Coucy
were to have led to Scotland was to be the invasion force, swollen to
awesome proportions. Chroniclers write in terms of 40,000 knights
and squires, 50,000 horses, 60,000 foot soldiers, gures which were
meant to be more impressive than precise. Preparations for Scotland
had been well under way before the Flemish interruption and were
now renewed in a colossal burst of activity. Money, as always, came
rst. A sales tax of 5 percent plus 25 percent on beverages had
already been levied throughout the kingdom for the Scottish
campaign, bringing in 202,000 livres. It was now renewed, as it was
to be repeatedly, never bringing in enough.
Ships were hired or purchased from every part of Europe from
Prussia to Castile, while French shipyards worked day and night.
The 600 ships assembled in the previous year were more than
doubled and the sight they made in the mouth of the Scheldt was
“the greatest of its kind ever seen.” Buonaccorso Pitti, the
ubiquitous Florentine, saw 1,200 ships of which 600 were combat
vessels mounted with the “castle” for archers. The French nobles,
counting on recouping expenses from booty and ransoms in
England, spared nothing in competitive splendor of gilded prows
and silvered masts and sails striped with cloth of gold and silk.
Admiral de Vienne commissioned a Flemish artist, Pierre de Lis, to
paint his agship red, adorned with his arms. Philip of Burgundy’s
black ship was decorated with the coats of arms of all his

possessions, and ew silken banners bearing his bold device “Il me
tarde,” meaning approximately “I don’t wait,” repeated in gold on
the mainsail. Coucy’s ship, “one of the most sumptuous of the
eet … very large and richly decorated,” met an unfortunate fate in
the Seine, where it was moored. It was seized with two other ships
in a daring raid up the river by a Portuguese admiral acting as an
ally of the Duke of Lancaster.
Coucy was not immune to the hubris of the hour. His seal,
attached to a receipt of October 1386 for payments connected with
the invasion eet, bears his arms combined with the royal leopard
of England. Evidently he felt endowed with some permanent claim,
perhaps in relation to his daughter Philippa, rst cousin of the King
of England. Coucy’s personal contingent in the invasion army
numbered 5 knights, 64 squires, and 30 archers.
The wide bays and estuaries of the Scheldt provided a huge,
sheltered gathering place for the armada, with communication by
land and sea and by inland canals to Bruges. Day after day the
parade of supplies came in—2,000 barrels to hold biscuit, timber to
make carts, portable handmills to grind wheat, cannonballs of iron
and stone from Reims, ropes, candles, lanterns, mattresses and straw
pallets, urinals, shaving basins, laundry tubs, gangplanks for horses,
shovels, pickaxes, and hammers. Clerks wrote a ceaseless stream of
orders, purchasing agents scoured Normandy and Picardy, Holland
and Zeeland, and as far as Germany and Spain for provisions—for
wheat to make 2,000 tons of biscuit, for salt pork and bacon,
smoked mackerel, salmon, eels, and dried herring, dried peas and
beans, onions, salt, 1,000 barrels (or four million liters) of French
wine, and 857 barrels of wine from Greece, Portugal, Lepanto, and
Rumania. The Duke of Burgundy ordered 101 beef cattle, 447 sheep,
224 hams, 500 fat hens, capons, and geese, containers of ginger,
pepper, saron, cinnamon, and cloves, 900 pounds of almonds, 200
of sugar, 400 of rice, 300 of barley, 94 casks of olive oil, 400
cheeses from Brie and 144 from Chauny.
Swords, lances, halberds, suits of armor, helmets “visored in the
new fashion,” shields, banners, pennants, 200,000 arrows, 1,000
pounds of gunpowder, 138 stone cannonballs, 500 ramming prows

for the ships, catapults, and ame-throwers were collected.
Armorers hammered and polished, embroiderers worked on
banners, bakers made ship’s biscuit, supplies were counted on
delivery, packed, stored, and loaded into the holds. The roadsteads
lled with cargo vessels, car-racks, barges, galleys, and galleons.
Of all the preparations, the most stupendous was the portable
wooden town to protect and house the invaders upon landing. A
huge camp enclosing a place for each captain and his company, it
was virtually an articial Calais to be towed across the Channel. Its
dimensions epitomized the fantasy of omnipotence. It was to have a
circumference of nine miles and an area of 1,000 acres surrounded
by a wooden wall 20 feet high reinforced by towers at intervals of
12 and 22 yards. Houses, barracks, stables, and markets where the
companies would come for their provisions were to be laid out
along prearranged streets and squares. William the Conqueror had
brought a dismountable wooden fort to England in aid of his landing
300 years before, and similar devices had been used many times
since, but nothing so daring in concept and size as this had ever
before been attempted. Pre-fabricated in Normandy by the work of
5,000 wood-cutters and carpenters, supervised by a team of
architects, it was to be packed and shipped in numbered sections, so
designed that assembly at the beachhead could allegedly be
accomplished in an unbelievable three hours. For belligerent
purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology
more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided
its use.
At the Scheldt the port overowed with nobles, functionaries,
craftsmen, and servants of every degree, all of whom had to be
housed and paid. The missing brilliance of the Count of Savoy was
made up by his son Amadeus VII, called the Red Count, who
entertained everyone, whether humble, middle, or great, and turned
away no one from his table without a meal. Eustache Deschamps,
too, was on hand as laureate for the occasion, writing condently,
Yours will be the land of England;
Where once there was a Norman Conquest,

Valiant heart will make war once more.
All the notable lords of France were present except the Duc de
Berry, whose delayed arrival caused misgiving.
Impatience for embarkation was rising. The nobles stayed at
Bruges “to be more at their ease,” and every few days rode over to
Sluys, where the King stayed, to learn if the day of departure had
been decided. The answer was always tomorrow or next week or
when the fog lifts or when the Duc de Berry comes. The mass of
men crowded into the area was growing restless and disorderly.
Many, including the poorer knights and squires, could not be paid,
and the cost of living was going up as the local people raised prices.
Knights complained that four francs could barely buy what formerly
was worth one. The Flemings were sullen and quarrelsome, “for the
common people bore a grudge in their minds for the battle of
Roosebeke.” They said to each other, “Why the Devil does not the
King of France pass over into England? Are we not in poverty
enough?”—although they admitted that “the Frenchmen make us no
poorer.”
All excuses for postponement now came to one—waiting for the
Duc de Berry. His non-arrival was a sign that the invading spirit was
not in fact unanimous, that doubts and conicting interests were
struggling behind the scenes, that a peace party represented by
Berry was opposing itself to the war party.
Berry was too absorbed in acquisition and art to be interested in
war. He lived for possessions, not glory. He owned two residences in
Paris, the Hôtel de Nesle and another near the Temple, and built or
acquired a total of seventeen castles in his duchies of Berry and
Auvergne. He lled them with clocks, coins, enamels, mosaics,
marquetry, illuminated books, musical instruments, tapestries,
statues, triptychs painted in bright scenes on dazzling gold ground
bordered with gems, gold vessels and spoons, jeweled crosses and
reliquaries, relics, and curios. He owned one of Charlemagne’s teeth,
a piece of Elijah’s mantle, Christ’s cup from the Last Supper, drops
of the Virgin’s milk, enough of her hairs and teeth to distribute as
gifts, soil from various Biblical sites, a narwhal’s teeth, porcupine’s

quills, the molar tooth of a giant, and enough gold-fringed
vestments to robe all the canons of three cathedrals at one time.
Agents kept him apprised of curiosities, and when one reported a
“giant’s bones” dug up near Lyon in 1378, he at once authorized
purchase. He kept live swans and bears representing his chosen
device, a menagerie with apes and dromedaries, and rare fruit trees
in his garden. He ate strawberries with crystal picks mounted in
silver and gold, and read by candlelight from six carved ivory
candle-holders.
Like most auent lords, he had a good library of classics and
contemporary works; he commissioned translations from the Latin,
bought romances from booksellers in Paris, and bound his books in
precious bindings, some in red velvet with gold clasps. He
commissioned from renowned illuminators at least twenty Books of
Hours, among them two exquisite masterpieces, the Grandes Heures
and Très Riches Heures. His pleasure was to see illustrated his
favorite scenes and portraits, including his own. Delicate multiple-
towered cities and castles, rural occupations, knights and ladies in
garden, hunt, and banquet hall, clad in garments of surpassing
elegance, ornamented the prayerbooks. The Duke himself usually
appears robed in the pure sky blue, whose pigment was so precious
that two pots of it were listed in an inventory of Berry’s “treasures.”
Berry introduced the newly invented pedal organ into his
churches and bought a new jacket for four livres so that his
cornettist who played so beautifully might perform a solo before
Charles V. He had gold and pearls ground together for a laxative,
and during enforced idleness when he was bled to relieve the eects
of gluttony and an apoplectic tendency, he played at dice, his
favorite pastime. In one game with knightly companions, he
wagered his coral prayer beads for forty francs. Accompanied by his
swans, bears, and tapestries, he moved continually from one of his
castles to another, carrying half-nished works of art by artists at
one place to be completed by those at another, taking part in local
processions and pilgrimages, visiting monasteries, enjoying wine
harvests in autumn, and sending home to the Duchess on one
occasion in June new peas, cherries, and 78 ripe pears. He collected

dogs, always searching for more, no matter how many he had, and
when he heard of an unusual variety of greyhound in Scotland,
obtained a safe-conduct from Richard II to allow four couriers on
horseback to make the round trip to bring him back a pair.
The funds to gratify his tastes were wrung from the people of
Auvergne, and of Languedoc when he was its governor, by the
heaviest taxation in France of his time, sowing the hatred and
misery that resulted in the insurrection of Montpellier and his own
recall. Punishment of the Tuchin rising in 1383, when he was again
governor in place of Anjou, was his most lucrative opportunity.
Instead of death sentences on the leaders, he sold pardons and
imposed on the communes an enormous ne of 800,000 gold francs,
four times as much as the whole of Languedoc had been able to
collect for the ransom of Jean II. It was to be paid for by an
unprecedented tax of 24 francs per hearth. Unchastened and
unchanged, Berry was to go on spending for thirty more years until
he had ruined his lands to pay his expenses and died insolvent in
1416 at the age of 76.
At the time when he was waited for at the Scheldt, he was 46,
vain, pleasure-loving, obstinate, a prey to parasites, mediocre in
mind and spirit, redeemed from vulgarity only by his love and
fostering of beauty. Perhaps that lifelong passion was a reaction to
his own ugly, coarse-grained features, which he perversely
emphasized; the pug-nosed face appears on plates, seals, cameos,
tapestries, altar panels, stained-glass windows, Books of Hours.
According to a popular verse, the Duke wished to surround himself
“only with snub-noses at his court.”
Berry did not appear at the Scheldt until October 14. By that time
the days were growing shorter and colder, the Channel rougher.
Meantime in mid-September, disaster smote the portable town.
Loaded aboard 72 ships, it was on the way from Rouen to the
Scheldt when the convoy was attacked by an English squadron out
of Calais and three of the French ships were captured, along with
the master carpenter in charge of construction. Too big to enter
Calais, two of the ships were towed to England and their sections of

the town exhibited in London to the awe and rejoicing of the
English. For the French the loss was a portent.
The Monk of St. Denis, never at a loss for omens, reported clouds
of crows carrying lighted coals which they deposited on thatched
barns, as well as one of the terrible storms which appear regularly at
all dark moments of his chronicle and, in this case, tore up the
tallest trees by their roots and destroyed a church by a thunderbolt.
On the day after Berry nally arrived, the elements, “seemingly
angered by the delay,” ung the sea into an uproar and raised
waves “like mountains” that shattered the ships and were followed
by such rains as seemed that God was sending a new Flood. Many
supplies, not yet loaded, were ruined.
Three weeks of indecision passed without action. In November the
captains of 150 of the invasion ships submitted a list of reasons why
embarkation was by now impossible: “Truthfully, the sea is cursed:
item, the nights are too long; item, too dark [and through a long
string of “items”], too cold, too rainy, too fresques. Item, we need a
full moon; item, we need wind. Item, the lands of England are
perilous, the ports are perilous; we have too many old ships, too
many small ships, we fear the small ships may be swamped by the
great ships.…” The unrelieved negatives hint at justication for a
decision already taken.
The whole immense enterprise with all its investment in ships,
arms, men, money, and provisions was called o, at least for the
winter. The grand army disintegrated and departed, perishable
supplies were sold to the Flemings below cost, the remainder of the
portable town was given by the King to the Duke of Burgundy, who
used it for construction in his own domain. Across the Channel, the
English celebrated.
That Berry had “no wish to go to England” himself and did not
wish the expedition to go was recognized at the time. Sentiment for
a negotiated peace was growing on both sides, though always
opposed by a war party in each country. Especially the mercantile
estate wanted to end this “useless war,” and many who recognized
that it was getting nowhere argued for peace as a step toward
ending the schism and uniting two great Christian kings against the

Turks. Whether or not Berry thought in these terms, he was
certainly concerned about the money absorbed by war, and he had
been in communication with the Duke of Lancaster, who would
have liked his country to be at peace with France in order to free
him to pursue his ambitions in Castile. Under pretext of a peace
parley, Berry and Lancaster had had a meeting earlier in the year
from which both had emerged looking pleased, and a year later
Berry, as a widower, negotiated to marry Lancaster’s daughter,
although that came to nothing.
Philip the Bold, even at the risk of leaving the kingdom in control
of his brother, could have sailed without him if his will had matched
the bold motto ying from his masts. But he feared the risk of a
rising in Flanders if he left. The banners proclaiming “I don’t wait”
were hauled down and he waited after all. At the same time the
Royal Council too developed doubts of military success. Long before
the portents of barn-igniting crows and tree-uprooting storms, a
report from Avignon mentioned “the great debate as to whether the
King will invade or not.”
The true determinant was probably reluctance at the water’s edge.
Crossing the Channel was an uncertain thing at best, and worse
against “the terrible west wind” of the late season. Above all loomed
a hostile beachhead on the other side. Facing that hazard, potential
invaders, after making preparations as grandiose as those of 1386,
have backed away—Napoleon for one, Hitler for another.
Throughout the war in the 14th century the English had allied
beachheads in Flanders, Normandy, or Brittany at their disposal, or
their own ports at Calais and Bordeaux. Lacking that advantage, the
French had never launched more than punitive raids with no
attempt to hold land. In either direction no successful invasion of a
hostile beachhead was ever carried out between 1066 and 1944.
If fear was a reason, it was not acknowledged. The invasion was
considered only postponed until the following year, when a smaller
version was to be launched under the command of the Constable
and Coucy. In March 1387 Charles VI paid a ceremonial visit to
Coucy-le-Château, partly to discuss plans, as indicated by a
surviving document which refers to provisions for the “army” that

the Sire de Coucy will take “for going to England.” Doubtless also
the King’s visit was in furtherance of the crown’s interest in Coucy’s
domain. This time no court poet documented the occasion, but a
petty crime committed in the course of the visit elicited one of the
royal letters of pardon which are windows on the life of the poor.
One Baudet Lefèvre, “a poor man with many children,” took from
the castle two tin serving platters used for service of the King’s
dinner, hid them under his tunic, and went to a hostel in the town,
where he was seen by a sergeant of “our dear and beloved cousin,
the Sire de Coucy,” who asked him, “What are you doing here?”
Baudet replied, “I am warming myself.” As he was speaking, the
sergeant saw the platters and arrested him. He was taken to prison
in the castle, where he was also found to have taken a silver-gilt
platter embossed with the royal mark. “In the prison he was like to
have died, but that our pardon and grace was humbly begged, and
since the said Baudet has always been a man of good life and honest
speech with no other misdeeds on his record, we are pleased to
grant him this grace and mercy,” and to quit, remit, and pardon the
supplicant, now and in the future, by “our special grace and royal
authority” of all oense, nes, civil and criminal punishment which
he may have sustained, and restore him and his good wife to their
goods, and to let this be known to all ocers of justice of the region
and their lieutenants or successors now or in the future.
That all this was required in the King’s name for the theft of three
platters—and the word theft is not used in the document—suggests,
beyond mere prolixity, the care taken to exhibit the King as
protector of the poor.
In May, two months after the King’s visit, Coucy attended a
meeting of the Royal Council with Admiral de Vienne, Guy de la
Tremolile representing Burgundy, Jean le Mercier, the King’s
minister, and others to confer on the renewed invasion of England.
According to the Monk of St. Denis, the “shameful” departure of the
King and nobles from the Scheldt had caused a painful impression
upon all Frenchmen, with the result that it was felt necessary to

erase the impression by striking a powerful blow at England, and to
“commit there all the excesses of an enemy upon an enemy.” Clearly
the plan for conquest had receded to something more in the nature
of a raid.
The expedition was to be split into two parts: one, commanded by
the Constable, to leave from Brittany, and the other, commanded by
the Admiral, Coucy, and Count Waleran de St. Pol, to leave from
Hareur in Normandy. Their objective was Dover. They were to
take 6,000 men-at-arms, 2,000 crossbowmen, 6,000 “other men of
war,” enough food for three months including hay and oats for the
horses, and armor in good condition. Intentions were certainly
genuine, for in June a vessel of the Sire de Coucy was loaded at
Soissons on the Aisne with foodstus, plate, cooking equipment,
linens, arms, and tents to be delivered at Rouen. Coucy, Vienne, and
the others were at Hareur at this time. Coastal raids from Calais
led by the ery Sir Harry Percy, called “Hotspur,” failed to halt
preparations because Percy attacked northward in the wrong
direction. The day for departure was xed, all provisions loaded,
every man given his wages for fteen days, and “the journey so far
forward that it was thought it could not be broken.”
Contriving as best they could to interfere, the English found their
cat’s-paw this time in the chronic conspirator Jean de Montfort,
Duke of Brittany. To determine where Montfort stood at any given
time, as he tried to hold his balance between England and France,
would have required the arts of a sorcerer. As parties of opposing
policy developed within each country, his problem became more
complicated and his deals ever more entangled. It is no wonder that,
according to repute, he was a sovereign given easily to tears.
One constant in his sentiments was hatred of his fellow Breton
and subject Olivier de Clisson, Constable of France. The feeling,
which was mutual, did not preclude Montfort’s making a treaty with
Clisson in 1381 by which, “in consideration of the perfect love and
anity we have for our dear and well-beloved cousin and vassal,
Messire Olivier, Seigneur de Clisson, Constable of France … we
promise to be a good, true, and benecient lord to the said

seigneur … and to guard well his honor and the state of his person.”
Olivier promised reciprocal loyalties as vassal. Montfort’s love and
anity turned to seething rage when Clisson arranged a marriage
between his daughter and Jean de Penthièvre, son of Montfort’s late
rival Charles of Blois, and now heir to the duchy, since Montfort at
that time had no sons.
Through various pressures and oers, England was working on
Montfort to take action to frustrate the French invasion. At the same
time he was involved with Burgundy and Berry. As a cousin of the
Duchess of Burgundy, he was linked to her husband in that intense
partisanship which automatically accompanied kinship through
marriage in the Middle Ages. In May 1387 he had concluded a
private treaty with the Duc de Berry. A common interest shared
with both brothers was hostility to the Constable.
As Coucy had foreseen, the Constableship bred enemies, among
whom the King’s uncles came naturally to the fore. Any occupant of
the oce was a gure whose power could threaten theirs, and
Clisson’s personality stimulated the antagonism, the more so
because of his wealth. He was making 24,000 francs a year from the
Constableship, acquiring efs, building a palace in Paris, and
lending money to everyone: to the King, the Duchesse d’Anjou,
Berry, Bureau de la Rivière, and 7,500 orins in 1384 to the Pope.
When debtors were late in repaying, as they usually were, he could
aord to extend the loans and take a prot in larger securities and
interest.
In June 1387 the one-eyed warrior was seized by Montfort in a
coup as sensational as, and very similar to, the attack on Bernabò,
though lacking its perfection. Montfort convoked a Parliament at
Vannes which all Breton nobles were obliged to attend. During the
proceedings he treated Clisson with the utmost amiability and
afterward entertained him at dinner and invited him with his
entourage to visit his new castle of Hermine near Vannes. Aably,
Montfort conducted his guests on a tour of the building, visited the
cellars to taste the wine, and on arriving at the entrance to the
donjon, said, “Messire Olivier, I know no man this side of the sea
who knows more about fortication than do you; wherefore I pray

you mount up the stairs and give me your opinion of the
construction of the tower, and if there are faults, I will have them
corrected according to your advice.”
“Willingly, Monseigneur,” replied Clisson, “I will follow you.”
“Nay, sir, go your way alone,” the Duke answered, saying that
while the Constable made his inspection he would converse with the
Sire de Laval, Clisson’s brother-in-law. Although Clisson had no
reason to trust his host, he relied on security as a guest. He mounted
the stairs, and as he entered the hall at the rst level, a waiting
body of men-at-arms seized and imprisoned him, loading him with
three heavy chains, while throughout the castle other men closed
doors and gates with violent banging.
At the sound, Laval’s “blood trembled” and he stared at the Duke,
who “became as green as a leaf.” “For God’s sake, Monseigneur,”
Laval cried, “what are you doing? Do not harm my brother-in-law,
the Constable!”
“Mount your horse and go from hence,” Montfort answered him.
“I know what I have to do.” Laval refused to leave without the
Constable. At that moment another of Clisson’s party, Jean de
Beaumanoir, hurried up in anxiety. Montfort, who hated him too,
pulled his dagger and, rushing upon him as if possessed, cried,
“Beaumanoir, do you wish to be like your master?” Beaumanoir said
that would honor him. “Do you wish, do you wish to be like him?”
the Duke cried in a fury, and when Beaumanoir said yes, Montfort
screamed, “Well then, I will put out your eye!” With shaking hand,
he held the dagger before the man’s eyes, but could not plunge it in.
“Go, go!” he cried hoarsely. “You shall have no better nor worse
than him,” and ordered his men to drag Beaumanoir o to a prison
chamber and load him, too, with chains.
Throughout the night Laval remained at the Duke’s side, staying
him by pleas and persuasions from ordering Clisson to be put to
death. Three times Montfort gave the order to cut o his head or tie
him in a sack for drowning, and twice the guards unloaded Clisson’s
chains preparatory to carrying out the order. Each time Laval, on his
knees, managed at the last moment to dissuade the tortured Duke,
reminding him how he and Clisson had been brought up together as

boys, how Clisson had fought in his cause at Auray, how, if he killed
him now, after inviting him to dinner and to his castle as a guest,
“no prince shall be so dishonored as you … reproached and hated
by all the world.” If instead he held Clisson to ransom, he could gain
great sums and towns and castles, for which Laval promised himself
as guarantor.
To this suggestion Montfort at last responded. He wanted no
pledge nor guarantor, but 100,000 francs in cash and the handing
over to his deputies of two towns and three castles, including
Josselin, Clisson’s home, before the Constable would be released.
Clisson had no choice but to sign the terms and remain incarcerated
while Beaumanoir was sent to collect the money. “And if I should
tell that such things happened and not tell openly the whole
matter,” wrote Froissart, “it would be a chronicle but no history.”
As alarm at the Constable’s disappearance spread rapidly, it was
widely believed that he had been put to death, and instantly
assumed by all that the voyage to England was “lost and broken.” At
Hareur, Coucy, Vienne, and St. Pol had no thought of going ahead
with the expedition without Clisson, even after it was known that he
was alive. The Duke’s terrible deed absorbed all minds, and the
insult to the King represented by the seizure of his Constable took
precedence over an act of war against England. The expedition with
all its ships, provisions, and men-at-arms was abandoned as before,
so easily as to raise a question whether the interruption may not
have been welcomed. If the coup was designed to frustrate the
invasion, it was a total success, but not for Montfort, who lacked the
granite will of Gian Galeazzo.
Like the schism in the Church, like the brigandage of knights, like
the worldliness of friars, Montfort’s act was destructive of basic
assumptions. It caused consternation. Knights and squires in anxious
discussion said to each other, “Thereby no man should trust in any
prince, since the Duke had deceived these noblemen.” What would
the French King say? Surely there never was such a shameful case in
Brittany or anywhere else. If a poor knight had done such a deed, he
would be dishonored forever. “In whom should a man trust but in
his lord? And that lord should maintain him and do him justice.”

On his release, Clisson, with only two pages, galloped straight for
Paris in such a fury to obtain satisfaction that he is said to have
covered 150 miles a day and to have reached the capital in 48
hours. The King, feeling his honor bound up with his Constable’s,
was eager for reprisal, but his uncles, who still governed for him,
were markedly less so. They seemed indierent to Clisson’s losses,
told him he should have known better than to accept Montfort’s
invitation, especially on the eve of embarking against England, and
dampened any suggestion of martial action against the Duke. On
this issue the division in the government opened between the uncles
on the one hand, and the Constable—supported by Coucy, Vienne,
Rivière, Mercier, and the King’s younger brother Louis—on the
other. Coucy insisted that the King must take cognizance and
require Montfort to make restitution. The uncles, already jealous of
Clisson’s inuence over the King and his close relations with Coucy
and Rivière, wanted no major eort that would enhance his
prestige. In the midst of the struggle, another crisis erupted.
A brash young exhibitionist, the Duke of Guelders, delivered by
herald an astonishing and insolent challenge to Charles VI,
announcing himself an ally of Richard II and therefore an enemy
prepared to defy “you who call yourself King of France.” His letter
was addressed simply to Charles de Valois. This swaggering gesture
by a petty German prince, ruler of a narrow territory between the
Meuse and the Rhine, dumbfounded the court, although it had an
explanation. The Duke of Guelders had recently accepted payment
for declaring himself a vassal of the King of England and his
challenge to the French King was a piece of troublemaking doubtless
inspired by the English.
Charles was enchanted by the chivalric opportunity. He showered
the herald with gifts and looked forward to spreading the glory of
his name in personal war and “seeing new and far countries.” Faced
with two challenges at once, by Brittany on the west and Guelders
on the east, the Council debated lengthily what to do. Some thought
Guelders’ gesture should be treated as pure “fanfaronade” and
ignored, but again Coucy made an issue of the dignity not so much
of the crown but of the nobles. He argued strenuously in the Council

that if the King suered such insults to pass unrequited, foreign
countries would hold the nobles of France very cheap since they
were the King’s advisers and sworn to uphold his honor. He may
have felt, too, that France had to do something after twice
abandoning the attack on England. The fact that he clearly felt the
issue personally impressed his listeners, and they agreed that he
“understood the Germans better than anyone else because of his
disputes with the Dukes of Austria.”
This time Coucy found himself an ally of Philip the Bold, who
strongly favored a campaign against Guelders in his own interests.
Between Flanders and Guelders lay the Duchy of Brabant, in whose
aairs Philip, with an eye to expansion, was deeply involved.
Encouraging the King’s enthusiasm, he committed France to war on
Guelders, but the Council insisted on settling with Brittany rst, for
they said if the King and his nobles went o to ght Guelders,
Montfort might open the way to the English.
Rivière and Admiral de Vienne, sent to treat with Montfort, met a
sullen refusal to yield. The Duke would say only that he repented of
nothing he had done to the Constable save for one thing: that he
had let him escape alive. Nor would he excuse his seizure of a guest,
“for a man ought to take his enemy wheresoever he can.” Several
months followed of pulling and tugging by all parties while Coucy at
each delay kept up pressure in the Council. The issue hung re as
the year ended, taking with it a once supreme troublemaker, the
withered viper Charles of Navarre.
After a last attempted poisoning—this time of Burgundy and
Berry—Navarre died in horrid circumstances. Sick and prematurely
old at 56, he was tormented by chills and shivering and at doctor’s
orders was wrapped at night in cloths soaked in brandy to warm his
body and cause sweat. To keep them in place, the wrappings were
sewn on each time like a shroud, and caught re one night from the
valet’s candle as he leaned over to cut a thread. To the King’s
shrieks of pain, the brandy-soaked cloth amed around his body; he
lived for two weeks with doctors unable to relieve his agony before
he expired.

In the new year the Council decided to send Coucy himself, as
Montfort’s former brother-in-law, in another eort to bring him to
terms. No one, it was felt, would be more agreeable to the Duke nor
“of greater weight”; with him would go Rivière and Vienne, making
a mission of “three very intelligent lords.” Informed of their coming,
Montfort understood from Coucy’s presence how heavily the matter
weighed. He greeted him aectionately, oered to take him hunting
and hawking, escorted him to his chamber, “sporting and talking of
many idle matters as lords do when they have not been together for
a long time.” When it came to the issue, even Coucy’s famed
persuasiveness and “ne, gentle words” could not at rst move him.
He stood at a window looking out for a long time in silence, then
turned and said, “How may any love be nourished when there is
nothing but hate?” and repeated that he repented only of letting
Clisson live.
It took two visits and Coucy’s most reasoned and eloquent
arguments and tactful hints of the weakness of Montfort’s position—
for in fact he had little support among his own subjects—to
accomplish his object. After rst persuading Montfort to give up
Clisson’s castles, he was sent back to get full restitution of the
money and, most dicult of all, to push, wheedle, and drag the
Duke to judgment in Paris. Desperately wanting to avoid Clisson,
Montfort advanced a thousand excuses, but with added pressure
from Burgundy, now anxious for a settlement, he was overborne.
Against his alleged fear of assassination, Coucy persuaded him to go
as far as Blois, where the King’s uncles would meet him. With a safe-
conduct from the King, reinforced by his own escort of 1,200 men,
Montfort ventured up the Loire in a otilla of six ships and, in June
1388, ultimately arrived at the gates of the Louvre in Paris.
Restitution of Clisson’s property and a formal pardon by the King
were sealed by the usual formula of reconciliation in which the
Duke and the Constable swore to be “good and loyal” sovereign and
vassal respectively and, glaring at each other, drank from the same
cup in token of “love and peace.”
From the King, in token of royal appreciation, Coucy received a
French Bible, and from history, through Froissart, a more

memorable tribute. “And I knew four lords who were the best
entertainers of others of all that I knew: they were the Duke of
Brabant, the Count of Foix, the Count of Savoy, and especially the
Lord of Coucy; for he was the most gracious and persuasive lord in
all Christendom … the most well-versed in all customs. That was the
repute he bore among all lords and ladies in France, England,
Germany, and Lombardy and in all places where he was known, for
in his time he had traveled much and seen much of the world, and
also he was naturally inclined to be polite.”
With these talents Coucy had brought to heel the most
troublesome vassal since Charles of Navarre.

By a uke of survival, the domestic accounts of Coucy-le-Château for the year
1386–87 remained in existence long enough for a local antiquarian, Lucien
Broche, to publish a report of them in 1905–09. The originals disappeared
during the First World War, in which Picardy suered great destruction.

Chapter 21

T
The Fiction Cracks
he double collapse of the French invasion of England and, on
the English side, the successive ascos of the Buckingham
and Norwich raids revealed the hollowness of knightly
pretensions. Adding to the indignity, Austrian knights were
slaughtered in 1385 by Swiss commoners at Sempach in a battle
that reversed the verdict of Roosebeke.
The Austrians, expecting to duplicate the French massacre of
“miscreants” of the non-warrior class, had dismounted to ght on
foot as the French had in Flanders. But the Swiss had been trained
in exibility and rapid movement, just the opposite of the impacted
line that had caused the Flemings’ defeat. When the tide turned
against the Austrians, their mounted reserves ed from the eld
without engaging, as Orléans’ battalion had ed at Poitiers. Out of
900 in the Austrian vanguard, almost 700 corpses, including Duke
Leopold’s, lay on the eld at the end.
What knights lacked in the fading 14th century was innovation.
Holding to traditional forms, they gave little thought or professional
study to tactics. When everyone of noble estate was a ghter by
function, professionalism was not greater but less.
Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever
more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince
itself that the ction was still the reality. Outside observers,
however, had grown increasingly critical as the ction grew
increasingly implausible. It was now fty years since the start of the
war with England, and fty years of damaging war could not fail to
diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor
make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people.
Deschamps openly mocked the adventure in Scotland in a long
ballad with the refrain, “You are not now on the Grand Pont in

Paris.”
You who are arrayed like bridegrooms,
You who talk so well when you are in France
Of the great deeds you will do,
You go to conquer what you have lost:
What is it? Renown that for so long
Honored your country.
If you seek to recover it in battle,
Display your hearts, not your fancy clothes.…
You are not now on the Grand Pont in Paris.
Mézières, too, writing his Songe du Vieil Pélérin in 1388, did not
restrain his scorn as Honoré Bonet had not restrained his
reproaches. Because the knights had won a victory “by the hand of
God at Roosebeke against a crowd of fullers and weavers, they take
on vainglory and think themselves the peers of their ancestors, King
Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godefrey of Bouillon. Of all the rules of
war written by Assyrians, Jews, Romans, Greeks, and all Christians,
this French chivalry does not keep one tenth, yet thinks there is no
chivalry in the world of valor equal to theirs.”
The nobles’ fashionable clothes and habits of luxury, their private
bedrooms where they shut themselves up till noon, their soft beds
and perfumed baths and comforts on campaign were cited as
evidence that knighthood had gone soft. The ancient Romans, as
Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University, remarked sarcastically
some years later, “did not drag after them three or four pack horses
and wagons laden with robes, jewels, carpets, boots and hose and
double tents. They did not carry with them iron or brass stoves to
make little pies.”
More than soft beds and foppery, the moral failure of chivalry
spread dismay. Instead of troubadours glorifying the ideal knight
and ideal love in romantic epics, moralists now deplored in satire
and allegory and didactic treatise what the knight had become—
predator and aggressor rather than champion of justice. Chansons de
gestes were no longer composed in the second half of the century,

although, since the lusty fabliaux disappeared at the same time, the
cause cannot be said to have been failure of the ideal so much as
some mysterious failing of the literary spirit. The vices and follies
and strange disorders of the time demanded moralizing, yet,
ironically, it is Froissart’s celebration of chivalry in its own image
that endures.
In Italy, the complaint had a dierent source: knighthood was
detached from nobility. “A few years ago,” lamented Franco
Sacchetti at the end of the century, “bakers, wool-carders, usurers,
money-changers, and blackguards became knights. Why does an
ocial need knighthood when he goes to preside over some
provincial town?… How art thou sunken, unhappy dignity! Of all
the long list of knightly duties, what single one do these knights of
ours discharge? I wish to speak of these things that the reader might
see that knighthood is dead.”
If Sacchetti’s tone was morose, it was widely shared. With the
courts of France and England ruled by minors and prey to factions,
with the new Emperor Wenceslas proving a drunkard and a brute,
with the Church split between two popes, each as remote from
holiness as it was possible to be, no brilliance of the ruling class
could cover its tarnish. Coucy was right in his perception of
diminishing prestige, even if his suggested remedy was only to make
matters worse.
The Guelders campaign of September–October 1388 proved that
snafu was a military condition long before the word was coined. The
expedition was mobilized on a scale out of all proportion to its petty
issue or possible gain. Because of his relationships in Bar and
Lorraine, which lay on the way, and his knowledge of the terrrain,
Coucy was designated to recruit the lords of the area and plan the
campaign. The preferable route lay through Brabant, but the towns
and nobles of that duchy warned that they would never allow
passage of a French army because it would cause more damage to
their lands “than if the enemy were in the country.”
A decision was perforce taken to march straight through the dark,
forbidding forest of the Ardennes, where, Froissart remarks with
awed inaccuracy, “no traveler had ever before passed.” This

necessitated sending surveyors to nd a way through, followed by a
force of 2,500 men to cut a road, an engineering task hardly less
challenging than the portable town. The cost was paid for by a triple
tax on salt and sales, for a purpose dicult to represent as defense
of the realm. Perhaps for that reason, Coucy had been required to
recruit in his own name as if for another expedition against the
Hapsburgs, rather than in the name of the King.
Led by Coucy, a vanguard of 1,000 lances began the march,
followed by the King and main body with “12,000” baggage carts,
not counting pack animals. While en route, Coucy was suddenly
detached for a mission to Avignon of unrecorded purpose but
probably concerned with the plan that continued to obsess the
French of conquering Rome for Clement. He returned—“to the great
joy of the whole army”—within about a month, which, considering
a journey of almost 500 miles each way, was energetic traveling.
Little combat and no glory were found at Guelders. The campaign
bogged down in negotiations. Tents were wet after a summer of
heavy rains, provisions rotted in the humidity, food was scarce
despite a rich country. The return after honor had been satised by
a negotiated apology from the Duke of Guelders, was wretched
under more heavy rains. Roads were mud, horses stumbled over
slippery logs and rocks, men were drowned in fording ooded
rivers, and wagons of booty oated away. Knights, squires, and
grand seigneurs came home without pride or prot, many of them
sick or exhausted and blaming the Duke of Burgundy whose
ambitions in Brabant they correctly held responsible. Coucy seems
to have incurred no blame as he had incurred none in the
insurrection of Paris. Since the start of the reign, the government of
the uncles had dragged the country into ruinous expense for a series
of grandiose projects ending in futility. At Guelders their credit ran
out.
Awareness of bad government speaks through the omens and
incidents inserted in the record by a censorious chronicler like the
Monk of St. Denis. While the army for Guelders was being
assembled, he reports, a hermit journeyed all the way from
Provence to tell the King and his uncles that he had been instructed

by an angel to warn them to treat their subjects more gently and
lessen the burden of taxes and subsidies. The nobles at court scorned
the hermit for his poverty and were deaf to his counsel, and though
the young King treated him kindly and was disposed to listen, the
uncles sent him away and levied the triple tax.
Deschamps’ satire grew more caustic after the Guelders campaign,
in which he had personally participated and fallen ill like others of
an “intestinal ux.” The military do not nd their best friend in a
war correspondent suering from dysentery. Through many ballads,
Deschamps’ theme is unfavorable comparison with knights of the
past. They had gained hardiness through long apprenticeship and
training, ridden long journeys, practiced wrestling and throwing the
stone, scaling forts, and combat with shield and sword. Now the
younger men scorn training and call those who wish to instruct
them cowards. They spend their youth eating and drinking,
spending and borrowing, “polishing themselves white as
ivory … each one a paladin.” They sleep late between white sheets,
call for wine on waking, eat partridges and fat capons, comb their
hair to perfection, know nothing about the management of estates,
and care for nothing but making money. They are arrogant,
irreligious, weakened by gluttony and debauchery, and unt for the
profession of arms, “the heaviest in the world.”
Denouncing them on the one hand for softness and indolence,
Deschamps castigates them on the other for recklessness,
improvidence, and bad judgment. In his Lay de Vaillance, they keep
no order, no night watch or scouts or advance guard, give no
protection to foragers, allow carts and provisions to be captured.
“When bread lacked for a day or it rained in the morning, they
cried, ‘The army will starve!’ ” and “when they let provisions spoil
on the ground, they wanted to turn back.” They start out in winter,
attack recklessly and in the wrong season, never ask the advice of
the older men until after danger threatens, complain loudly when in
trouble, and open themselves to defeat. “Because of mad
recklessness, such armies are to be despised.”
Deschamps is a scold but not an advocate of fundamental change
or infusion of new blood into the nobility. He is bourgeois in

sympathy, deplores injustice to the peasant, and writes ballads in
praise of rural Robin and Margot for their love of France, but he
denounces peasants who attempt to become squires and remove
themselves from labor on the land. “Such rogues should be brought
to justice and made to keep their class.”
All of society is found corrupt in Mézières’ Dream of the Old
Pilgrim. Like Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman, it is an allegorical
guidebook to the troubles of the age and, in addition, a plea for
“reformation of all the world, all Christianity and especially the
Kingdom of France.” The pilgrim Ardent Desire and his sister Good
Hope journey through the world to test the tness of mankind for
the return of the Queen of Truth and her attendants Peace, Mercy,
and Justice, long absent from the earth. Mézières’ message was
urgent, his sense of wrongdoing profound, his prognosis somber.
As if in response, Charles VI at age twenty dismissed his uncles
and assumed full sovereignty himself immediately upon returning
from Guelders in 1388. The Cardinal of Laon, ranking prelate,
proposed the motion at a meeting of the Council. A few days later
he fell ill and died, “delivered from the fury and hate of the uncles
of the King,” and widely believed to have been poisoned by them.
Clisson later boasted to an English envoy that it was he who had
made Charles VI “king and lord of his realm and put the government
out of the hands of his uncles.” Apart from Clisson’s personal
enmity, Coucy and others in the Council at the time were anxious to
lift from the crown and themselves the further burden of the Dukes’
unpopularity. The person most closely concerned, however, was the
King’s younger, cleverer, more dynamic brother and, for the time
being, heir apparent, Louis, Duc de Touraine, soon to be known by
his more familiar title, Duc d’Orléans.
Beginning in 1389, Louis of Orléans replaced the Duke of
Burgundy in the Royal Council and for the rest of his brief, eventful
life, already nearly half over, was to play a major role in French
aairs, with a particular link to Coucy. A handsome pleasure-seeker
and “devoted servant of Venus” who enjoyed the company of
“dancers, atterers, and people of loose life,” he was also devoutly
religious and used to retreat for two or three days at a time to the

Celestine monastery, whose quarters in Paris (on the present Quai
des Célestins) had been established by his father in 1363. A
penitential order favored too by Philippe de Mézières, who had been
the royal princes’ tutor, the Celestins observed extreme rules of
abstinence designed to promote concentration on eternity and
disappearance of the body. Louis was much inuenced by Mézières,
whom he named his executor. He had evidently learned more from
him than had his brother, for he was said to be the only member of
the royal family who could understand diplomatic Latin. Something
of a scholar for one of his station, he was also a compulsive gambler
at chess and tennis as well as dice and cards. He played with his
butler, his cup-bearer, and his carver, and at tennis with fellow
nobles lost sums up to 2,000 gold francs.
Louis was as rapacious and ambitious for power as the uncles
whom he ousted to make way for his ambition. The feud he thereby
started was to end nineteen years later in his murder by his cousin
Jean, son and successor of the Duke of Burgundy, tear France and
Burgundy apart, and re-open the way to the English. Toward the
end of his life he adopted a device of strange signicance, the camal,
a clerical hood or knight’s mantle, which was said at the time to
represent Ca-mal or Combien de mal, meaning how much evil is done
in these days. Born to the century’s last generation, Louis, for all his
indulgences in pleasure, saw his world somberly. A verse of the time
describes him as
Sorrowing, even sad, yet beautiful;
He seemed too melancholy for one
Whose heart was hard as steel.
Coucy, though clearly associated with the ousting of the Dukes,
nevertheless entertained Philip the Bold and his son the Count of
Nevers immediately afterward. The Duke’s accounts show that he
and his son dined and slept at the castle on December 8 “at the
expense of Monseigneur de Coucy,” and that during the visit he
presented a diamond ring to the Dame de Coucy and a brooch of

sapphires and pearls to her baby daughter. Coucy was always worth
cultivating.
The reorganized Council made a serious eort to end the Dukes’
personal autocracy and restore the administrative system of Charles
V. The Marmosets—Rivière, Mercier, and others—regained
authority, bureaucracy was purged of the uncles’ men, ve
commissioners of reform were appointed to seek out the worst
abuses, remove corrupt ocials, and replace them by “good men.”
As a step toward reconciliation with the bourgeois of Paris, the
oce of Provost of Paris and some, though not all, former municipal
oces and privileges were restored. Measures were taken, or at
least formulated, to improve sewage collection and restrict
professional beggars, whose crutches and eye-patches and gruesome
sores and stumps were stripped o each night in the district known
by virtue of the transformations that took place there, as the Cour
des Miracles.
The central problem of nancing government was recognized in a
series of ordinances dealing with nancial and judicial reforms.
Cancellation of the University’s tax-exemption was one measure
attempted by Rivière and Mercier with no good result, for it earned
them the powerful enmity of the University to add to that of the
Dukes.
At the same time in England, a more lethal drama of King against
uncles and other opponents was taking place. The central gure was
Philippa de Coucy’s husband, Robert de Vere, ninth Earl of Oxford,
King Richard’s closest adviser and friend. Brought to court as a boy
by virtue of his marriage to Philippa, Oxford gained a dominant
inuence over Richard, who was ve years his junior and fatherless.
He “managed the King as he pleased,” and “if he had said black was
white, Richard would not have contradicted him.… By him
everything was done and without him nothing done.”
The King at 21, slender, yellow-haired, pale-faced, with a skin
that ushed easily, was “abrupt and stammering in his speech,”
over-splendid in dress, averse to war, ill-tempered with his

domestics, arrogant and capricious. His Plantagenet pride, combined
with Oxford’s inuence, shaped an erratic and willful sovereign who
levied extortionate taxes to pay for his luxuries. Before his downfall,
which nished o the Plantagenets, he invented the handkerchief,
recorded in his household rolls as “little pieces [of cloth] made for
giving to the lord King for carrying in his hand to wipe and clean
his nose.”
Government by favorite leans toward the arbitrary exercise of
power, which in any case was Richard’s natural tendency. He had
made Oxford a Knight of the Garter and, at 21, a member of the
Privy Council, and showered on him a stream of endowments—
lands, castles, wardships, lordships, revenues—and a hereditary
sheridom belonging to Buckingham’s wife’s family. This was
unwise, but if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish
history with moral lessons. The ruthless Buckingham, now Duke of
Gloucester, did not need extra provocation to hate his nephew,
whom he despised for his reluctance to pursue the war. Attracting
the enemies of Oxford, Gloucester became the focus of the
oppositionist party bent on curbing the power of the King’s favorite.
The struggle reached a peak when Richard, on the occasion of a
rebellion in Ireland, created for Oxford the unprecedented title of
Marquis of Dublin and subsequently Duke of Ireland with
precedence over all the earls. He was given regal powers to crush
the rebellion, but instead of going to Ireland, which would at least
have given the nobles the satisfaction of removing him from the
scene, Oxford was smitten by love for a Bohemian lady-in-waiting of
Richard’s Queen. Such was his passion that he determined to
divorce Philippa in order to marry the Bohemian lady, thus
infuriating Philippa’s royal uncles, the Dukes of Lancaster,
Gloucester, and York. Despite the insult to the royal family, Richard
was too hypnotized by Oxford to do other than “improperly and
sinfully consent” to, and even assist in, his own cousin’s repudiation.
Oxford submitted to Rome an appeal for divorce based on “false
testimony,” Richard entreated Pope Urban for favorable
consideration, and the Pope felt no compunction in complying since
Philippa was of Clementist lineage.

Oxford’s treatment of his wife was said by Froissart to be “the
principal thing that took away his honor.” Even his mother joined in
the general condemnation and showed it by taking Philippa to live
with her. Probably it was the fact of Philippa’s royal blood and
Oxford’s personal unpopularity rather than moral indignation that
excited all the disapproval. Although marriage was a sacrament,
divorce was frequent and, given the right strings to pull, easily
obtained. In Piers Plowman all lawyers are said to “make and
unmake matrimony for money,” and preachers complained that a
man might get rid of his wife by giving the judge a fur cloak. In
theory, divorce did not exist, yet marriage litigation lled the courts
of the Middle Ages. Regardless of theory, divorce was a fact of life, a
permanent element in the great disharmony between medieval
theory and practice.
A formal appeal against Oxford and four other councillors of the
King’s party was presented in November 1387 by a group of lords
known by virtue of their action as the Lords Appellant. When they
appointed a Commission of Government headed by Gloucester with
powers as Regent, Richard and Oxford gathered an army to assert
the King’s sovereignty by force of arms. The conict came to a head
in the so-called Battle of Radcot Bridge: facing superior forces,
Oxford escaped by leaping into the river on horseback, after
discarding part of his armor, and galloping away on the far side into
the dusk. He took ship for Flanders, where he had taken the
precaution to deposit large sums with Lombard bankers at Bruges.
A month later, in February 1388, the lords in a session known as
the Merciless Parliament brought charges of treason against Oxford
and the Chancellor, Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suolk, who had also
escaped. They were charged with conspiring to control the King,
exclude his proper councillors, murder the Duke of Gloucester,
impoverish the crown by grants to themselves and their relatives,
override Parliament, and return Calais to the French King in
exchange for aid against their domestic opponents. The Parliament
sentenced Oxford and Suolk in absentia to be hanged as traitors.
Three others who had not escaped—the Chief Justice, the Mayor of
London, and Richard’s former tutor, Sir Simon Burley—were

executed. Richard remained, humiliated and robbed of the friend he
was never to see again. To abase a King and leave him on the throne
has its dangers. Richard was to have his revenge.
Against Coucy’s erce opposition, Oxford was invited to France in
1388 on the grounds that it would be advantageous to obtain
information from him about the quarrels in England. It may be, too,
that Oxford had indeed made overtures about Calais. Although
Coucy “hated him with all his heart,” he was forced to acquiesce.
Oxford came, was received at court and well entertained, but Coucy
did not rest until, with the support of Clisson, Rivière, and Mercier,
he prevailed upon the King to expel the dishonorer of his daughter
from France. A residence was found for Oxford in Brabant, where, in
1392, he was killed in a boar hunt at the age of thirty. King Richard
had his body brought back for reburial in England, and in an ornate
if lonely ceremony, gazed mournfully upon the embalmed face and
placed a ring on the dead nger of the great troublemaker.
Meanwhile, the divorce having been annulled, Philippa remained
the legal Countess of Oxford.
A royal grant made to Coucy at this time testied to the scars left
by plague and war over the last decades. In November 1388 he was
appointed Grand Bouteiller (Grand Butler) of France, the equivalent
of chief seneschal or domestic steward to the crown. At the same
time he was granted the privilege of holding two annual fairs of
three days each, with the sale of all merchandise exempted from
taxes. The language of the grant states that the town of Coucy had
three times suered “the res of mischief, which occurred in the
said town because of lack of laborers who died during the great
mortality. And also owing to preceding wars, the inhabitants and
community of the said town, castle and lands of Coucy were so
impoverished, diminished and reduced in people, houses, manors,
rents, revenues and all other goods and chattels, that the said town
was in danger of becoming deserted and uninhabitable, and the
vines, elds and other husbandries going to waste.”

The intent of the grant, which followed a survey of the barony at
the time of the King’s visit to Coucy the year before, was clearly
designed, in the royal interest as much as in Coucy’s, to restore the
health of a crucial domain. The barony is described by the grant as
the “key and frontier” of the kingdom with borders reaching to
Flanders and the Empire, and the castle as “one of the most notable
and beautiful of the realm.” By the “deserting and uninhabiting of
the said town and castle, if that should happen, many great perils,
damages and irreparable inconveniences could issue.” The fact that
the grant followed immediately upon the transfer of power to the
group dominated by the Marmosets, Clisson, and Coucy himself, was
certainly no coincidence.
From this time on, Coucy served as rst Lay President of the
Chambre des Comptes, a post associated with the oce of
Bouteiller, which originally had charge of the royal revenues and
accounts. While he does not seem to have collected wages for the
oce, he continued to receive an annual pension from the crown.
His domain, greatly enlarged by his many acquisitions, and now
comprising 150 towns and villages, was apparently extensive
enough to surmount the declining fortunes of lesser landowners.
Picardy, his native region, so often in the path of invasion, was
“beaten and chastised,” wrote Mézières, himself a Picard, “and
today no longer ourishes.” From places reduced to misery, the last
peasants ed to other regions so that “at present,” according to a
complaint of 1388, “laborers cannot be found to work or cultivate
the land.” The marks of a century of woe—lowered population,
dwindling commerce, deserted villages, ruined abbeys—were
everywhere in France, and cause enough for the climate of
pessimism. Certain communes in Normandy were reduced to two or
three hearths; in the diocese of Bayeux several towns had been
abandoned since 1370, likewise several parishes of Brittany. The
commerce of Châlons on the Marne was reduced from 30,000 pieces
of cloth a year to 800. In the region of Paris, according to an
ordinance of 1388, “many notable and ancient highways, bridges,
lanes, and roads” had been left to decay—gutted by streams,
overgrown by hedges, brambles, and trees, and some, having

become impassable, abandoned altogether. The same examples
could be multiplied for the south.
The schism had caused physical as well as spiritual damage, as
when a Benedictine abbey, already twice burned by the companies,
was cut o from the revenue of its estates in Flanders and spent so
much money on lawyers in various disputes that the Pope was
obliged to reduce its tax from 200 livres to 40 for a period of 25
years. Other abbeys, robbed by the companies or depopulated by
the plague, fell into indiscipline and disorder, and in some cases into
disuse, their lands reverting to waste. Decreased revenue and rising
costs impoverished many landowners, causing them to exact new
fees and invent new kinds of taxes to impose on their tenants. When
this hastened ight from the land, the nobles tried to prevent it by
conscating goods and by other penalties that increased the
peasants’ hostility.
Gathered together, the facts of decay convey too solid an
impression. In real life every age is a checkerboard of light and
dark. At the turn of the century the renowned Spanish knight Don
Pero Niño, on a visit to France, left a picture of noble life as
enchanted and bucolic in reality as it was often represented to be in
tapestries and Books of Hours. The castle of Serifontaine, which he
visited, was situated on the banks of a river in Normandy and
furnished as richly “as if it had been in the city of Paris.” Around it
were orchards and gracious gardens, and a walled shpond from
which each day, by opening the conduits, enough sh could be
taken to serve 300 people. The elderly and ailing but complaisant
host, Reynaud de Trie, Vienne’s successor as Admiral of France,
possessed forty or fty hounds, twenty horses of all kinds for his
personal use, forests full of game great and small, falcons for
hunting by the river, and for a wife, “the most beautiful lady then in
France.” She appears to have been remarkably privileged.
This lady “had her own noble dwelling apart from that of the
Admiral,” though connected by a drawbridge, and was attended by
ten noble and richly dressed damsels who had no duties but to
entertain themselves and their lady, for she had many serving maids
as well. In the morning she and her damsels went to a grove, each

with her Book of Hours and rosary, and said their prayers seated
apart from each other and not conversing until they had nished.
Returning to the castle, picking violets and other owers as they
went, they heard low mass in the chapel, after which they ate
roasted larks and chicken from a silver plate accompanied by wine.
Then, on nely saddled horses, together with knights and squires
they rode in the country, where they made chaplets of owers and
sang “lays, virelays, roundelays, complaints, ballads and songs of all
kinds which the French compose,” harmonizing in voices “diverse
and well-attuned.”
At the elaborate main meal of the day in the castle hall, each
gentleman sat beside a lady, and “any man who with due measure
and courtesy could speak of arms and love was sure … that he
would be heard and answered as his desire would have it.” Minstrels
played during the meal and for dancing by the knights and ladies
afterward, which lasted for an hour and ended with a kiss. Spices
and wine were served followed by a siesta, after which the company
rose for heron-hunting with falcons by the river. There “you would
have seen great sport, dogs swimming, drums beating, lures waving,
and ladies and gentlemen enjoying delight beyond description.”
Dismounting in a meadow, they were served cold partridges and
fruits and, while they ate and drank, made chaplets of greenery and
returned to the castle singing.
At nightfall they had supper, played bowls or danced by
torchlight “far into the night,” or sometimes the Dame, perhaps
bored by the cycle of pleasure, “went to seek distraction afoot in the
country.” After more fruits and wine, the company went to bed. In
the decline of Rome, too, there must have been pockets of wealth
and delight and serene days where trouble never penetrated.
Paris was another matter. Deschamps describes a raucous
evening’s entertainment, at an unspecied date, which began with
dinner at Berry’s residence, the Hôtel de Nesle, and moved on to a
dice game in a tavern. The guests were Coucy and the three Dukes—
Berry, Burgundy, and Bourbon—as well as “several good Lombards,”
and knights and squires, whose drinking and gaming in low-class

surroundings inspired the poet to a lengthy if torpid tract against
gambling.
Unhappily, Coucy gures also in a more spirited lament on the
subject of baldness, in which Deschamps pleads for the return of
head-coverings at court to spare the feelings of the bald, among
whom he names himself and twelve great lords, including the Sire
de Coucy. That baldness should be the only specic detail of his
physical appearance to reach posterity is a sad trick of history, even
if he was in good company. The Count de St. Pol, the Sire de
Hangest, Guillaume de Bordes, bearer of the Oriamme at
Bourbourg, and other great knights and distinguished servitors of
the late King were among the “skinheads.” Less fortunate were the
cheveux reboursés—that is, those with little hair who carried combs
and mirrors to keep their few strands combed over the bald spot.
What is puzzling is that uncovered heads, a sign of shame, could
have at any time become a fad—unless they were adopted as a kind
of anti-chic by the dandies of the time in their craving, complained
of by the preacher John Bromyard, “to devise some new piece of
foppery to make men gaze at them in wonderment anew.”
Deschamps was concerned with men as they are, not as they
should be. Pimps, sorcerers, monks, scolds, lawyers, tax-collectors,
prostitutes, prelates, rascals, female procurers, and a variety of
repugnant hags populate his verses. As he grew older, his vision
grew sourer, perhaps owing to the number of his ailments, including
toothache, “the cruellest of suerings.” For a regimen of good health
he advised drinking light red wine mixed with running water,
abstaining from spiced drinks, cabbage, strong meats, fruits,
chestnuts, butter and cream, and sauces of onion and garlic,
dressing warmly in winter and lightly in summer, taking exercise,
and never sleeping on the stomach.
Though he never lost his indignation at social injustice,
Deschamps looked with a satiric eye on the human species, which
though endowed with reason, prefers folly. The sins of the age he
most condemned were impiety causing disobedience to God, pride
that generates all other vices, sodomy the “unnatural” sin, sorcery,
and love of money. In the new reign, though he held a post as maître

d’hôtel to Louis d’Orléans, he felt himself displaced at court by
frivolous and over-dressed young men of doubtful courage,
equivocal habits, and uncertain faith. His complaint of court life was
the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was
composed of hypocrisy, attery, lying, paying and betraying; it was
where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth
dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind,
and dumb.
After fty years, the purpose of the war had faded and men could
hardly remember its cause. Although the Duke of Gloucester and the
“boars” of England were as bellicose as ever, they could not raise
the funds for another expedition. In France, the aborted invasion of
England had drained desire for aggression. Anti-war sentiment was
growing, even if, in the case of Mézières, it was in the interest of
turning hostility against the indel. “All Christendom has been
disturbed for fty years by your ambition to gain a little ground.
The rights and wrongs of the matter have long been obscured and
all Christians must now be held responsible for the shedding of so
much Christian blood.” To bring Christians together for a crusade
was not seen by a man like Mézières as war but as the use of the
sword for the glory of God.
After six months’ parley, a three years’ truce, but still no
denitive settlement, was concluded in June 1389, with intricate
provisions for negotiating each transfer of territory or sovereignty in
case of dispute. With communication restored, Coucy was now able
to send a messenger to Philippa in England “from his great desire to
know certainly of her welfare.” He was appointed Captain of
Guienne to supervise the truce in the south and to guard and defend
the country from Dordogne to the sea, including Auvergne and
Limousin.
The news of peace was received by the common people, in at least
one case, with skepticism and a curious revival of the prophecy once
attributed to Coucy about the King and his spade. The citizens of
Bois-Gribaut in the Limousin fell to discussing the news of the truce

brought by a bourgeois of their village on his return from Paris.
Some were unimpressed, saying they would soon be assembling
against England again. A poor witless shepherd named Marcial le
Vérit, who was said to have been held in prison by the English in
great misery, expressed a more subversive opinion for which he was
later arrested: “Don’t you believe it. You will never see peace. As for
me, I don’t believe it, because the King has destroyed and pillaged
Flanders as he did Paris. And what’s more, the Seigneur de Coucy
brought him a spade and told him that when he had destroyed his
country, he would have to use that.” The saying had evidently
struck a responsive chord.
Coucy appeared as a symbol of another kind in a challenge
addressed to him before the truce was signed by Thomas Mowbray,
Earl of Nottingham and future Duke of Norfolk, one of the Lords
Appellant whom Richard was courting and had appointed Earl
Marshal of England for life. To this young man of 23, Coucy
represented the epitome of chivalry; to encounter him in combat
was to learn prowess and gain honor. When piety and virtue, the
supposed springs of knightly conduct, were conspicuous by their
absence, the cloak of honor and valor was all the more anxiously
sought. Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the
bad times in history come when they cannot.
As “a man of approved honor, valor, chivalry and great renown,
as is known in many honorable places,” Coucy was challenged by
Nottingham to name a day and place for a joust of three points of
the lance, three of the sword, three of the dagger, and three blows
of the ax on foot. He was to send, sealed with his seal, “a good and
loyal safe-conduct” from his King, and if Calais were chosen as the
site, Nottingham would in turn supply a safe-conduct from his King.
He suggested that the combat take place in front of “as many
persons as you and I shall be prepared to supply with safe-conduct
and lodging.” No record exists of a reply or of any such joust taking
place. Coucy was either uninterested or unwilling to engage while
the truce was still pending.
Foiled of glory, Nottingham took up the famous challenge of St.
Ingelbert in the following year when the dashing Boucicaut and two

companions, angered by English boasting after the truce, oered to
hold the lists against all comers in any form of combat for thirty
days. Prudent counsel advised against re-opening a quarrel so soon
after the truce for the whims of “wild young knights,” and friends
advised the three that it would be beyond their powers. Boucicaut
was not one to be moved by prudence. At sixteen he had fought his
rst battle at Roosebeke where a huge Fleming, mocking his youth
and small size, told him to go back to his mother’s arms. Drawing
his dagger, Boucicaut had plunged it into the man’s side with the
words, “Do the children of your country play games like these?” He
and his companions maintained the lists of St. Ingelbert with great
courage and he went on to become Marshal of France and share in
Coucy’s last adventure.
Nottingham’s craving for combat was to have a darker conclusion.
Ten years later it led him as Duke of Norfolk to the historic duel
with Bolingbroke which was to precipitate the downfall of Richard
II. Banished together with his opponent at the time of the duel,
Nottingham was to die in exile within a year.
Moving from place to place, visiting, investigating, asking
questions, Jean Froissart came to Paris in the month when the truce
was signed to visit “the gentil Sire de Coucy … one of my seigneurs
and patrons.” In the twenty years since the death of his rst patron,
Queen Philippa of England, Froissart had enjoyed some support
from the Emperor Wenceslas and had obtained a clerical living
through the patronage of Guy de Châtillon, Count of Blois, with no
duties but to continue his history. When Guy de Blois went
bankrupt, Coucy had proposed Froissart for a canonry of Lille which
had so far not materialized. Meantime,
The good seigneur de Couci
Often stued my st
With [a bag of] red-sealed orins.*

While the recipient of patronage is likely in turn to be generous
with compliments, Froissart’s for Coucy seem more than merely
conventional; they add up to a distinct individual. “Gentil” was a
word routinely applied to any important and well-considered noble,
meaning no more than that he or she was nobly born; Coucy, in
addition, is “subtle,” “prudent,” and especially “imaginatif” or “fort-
imaginatif,” meaning intelligent, thoughtful, or far-seeing, and the
all-inclusive “sage” or “très-sage,” which could mean wise, sensible,
wary, rational, discreet, judicious, cool, sober, staid, well-behaved,
steady, virtuous, or presumably any or all of these. He is also
described as “cointe,” meaning elegant in manner and dress,
gracious, courteous, valiant—a compendium of the attributes of
chivalry.
Book One of Froissart’s Chronicles, in which chivalry immediately
recognized a celebrator, had appeared in 1370, at once creating a
wide demand. The oldest extant manuscript copy of Book One, now
in the Royal Library of Belgium, bears the Coucy coat-of-arms.
Multiple copying of manuscripts was no longer the monopoly of
lonely monks in their cells but the occupation of professional scribes
who had their own guilds. Licensed in Paris by the University,
supposedly to ensure accurate texts, the scribes were the agony of
living authors, who complained bitterly of the copyists’ delays and
errors. The “trouble and discouragement” a writer suers, wailed
Petrarch, was indescribable. Such was the “ignorance, laziness, and
arrogance of these fellows” that when a writer has given them his
work, he never knows what changes he will nd in it when he gets
it back.
The rise of a bourgeois audience in the 14th century and the
increased manufacture of paper created a reading public wider than
the nobles who had known literature from recitation or reading
aloud in their castle halls. The mercantile class, familiar by reason
of its occupation with reading and writing, was ready to read books
of all sorts: verse, history, romance, travel, bawdy tales, allegories,
and religious works. Possession of books had become the mark of a
cultivated man. Since the magnates and newly rich imitated the

manners, ideals, and dress of the nobility, the chronicles of chivalry
had a great vogue.
What books Enguerrand VII may have owned in addition to
Froissart’s Chronicles are not known except for those listed in the
royal archives as gifts to him from the King. In addition to the
French Bible from Genesis to Psalms, which he was given for his
services in subduing the Duke of Brittany, he received in 1390 the
romance of King Peppin and His Wife Bertha Bigfoot and the rhymed
Gestes de Charlemagne, “well-inscribed on three columns to the page
in a very large volume,” which had belonged to the Queen and
which “the King took from her and gave to Monsieur de Coucy.”
Froissart arrived in Paris from the south, where he had visited
another patron, the Count of Foix, and had been received by the
Pope in Avignon. He had also attended the wedding of the Duc de
Berry to a twelve-year-old bride, the occasion of much ribald
comment. Eager for rst-hand reports of these aairs, Coucy invited
Froissart to accompany him on a journey to his ef at Mortagne.
Riding together, they exchanged news, Coucy telling the chronicler
what he knew of the truce parleys, and Froissart full of tales about
his eulgent host at Foix. It appeared that the Count of Foix, who
had the wardship of Berry’s bride, had taken cool advantage of the
Duke’s ardor; he had strung out the marriage negotiations until
Berry, in his impatience, agreed to pay 30,000 francs to cover the
maiden’s expenses while she had been Foix’s ward.
In the course of persistent questioning, Froissart had drawn from
the Count of Foix a contemporary view of the 14th century, seen
from a position of privilege. The history of his own lifetime, Gaston
Phoebus said, would be more sought after than any other because
“in these fty years there have been more feats of arms and more
marvels in the world than in 300 years before.” To him the ferment
of the times was exciting; he had no misgivings. In the midst of
events there is no perspective.
No misgivings about knighthood played a part in a frenzied
celebration of that dignity on the occasion of the knighting of
twelve-year-old Louis II of Anjou and his younger brother aged ten.
In the ceremony’s four days of all-too secular festivities staged in the

royal Abbey of St. Denis, 14th century France relived the decadence
of Rome, and indeed the knighting of little boys was not so far
removed from the emperor who made a Consul of his horse. The
surpassing pomp of the occasion and the selection of St. Denis as the
site were intended to promote enthusiasm for the Angevin recovery
of the Kingdom of Naples. Radical alterations were made in the
abbey’s precincts to accommodate tournaments, dances, and
banquets. Religious services gave way to the hammering of
carpenters and the coming and going of laborers and their materials.
At the ceremony, after ritual baths and prayers, the two princelings,
robed in oor-length furred mantles of double red silk, were
escorted to the altar by squires holding naked swords by their points
with golden spurs hanging from the hilts. In his enthusiasm for
chivalric forms, Charles VI resurrected antique rituals which had
fallen into disuse in his father’s time and were already so faded that
spectators “thought it all strange and extraordinary” and inquired
what the rites signied.
The same nostalgia was enacted in the next day’s tournament,
when knights in polished armor were conducted to the lists by noble
ladies “to imitate the gallantry of ancient worthies.” Each of the
ladies in turn drew from her bosom a ribbon of colored silk to
bestow graciously upon her knight. After each day’s jousts and
tourneys, the celebrants “turned night into day” with dances,
masquerades, feasting, drunkenness, and, according to the indignant
Monk of St. Denis, “libertinage and adultery.” Knighthood,
represented by the two half-forgotten little principals, was not
noticeably enhanced.
Government expenditure continued to mount through the year
1389 to an excess as extravagant as the uncles’, although its purpose
was civil rather than military. Its climax was the ceremonial entry
into Paris of Isabeau of Bavaria, for her coronation as Queen, an
event of spectacular splendor and unparalleled marvels of public
entertainment. Though its cost contradicted the good intentions of
the new government, the performance was in itself a form of
government in the same sense as a Roman circus. What is
government but an arrangement by which the many accept the

authority of the few? Circuses and ceremonies are meant to
encourage the acceptance; they either succeed or, by costing too
much, accomplish the opposite.
Some of the Queen’s thunder was stolen by Valentina Visconti, the
new wife of Louis d’Orléans, who arrived just in time for the
occasion. Since her marriage by proxy to Louis in 1387, the two
intervening years had been required by her father, Gian Galeazzo, to
amass her unprecedented dowry of half a million gold francs, plus
Asti and other territories of Piedmont. Valentina was his only
remaining child, to whom he was so attached that he left Pavia
rather than be present at her departure, “and this was because he
could not take leave of her without bursting into tears.” As the
daughter of his dead wife, Isabelle of France—and thus Louis of
Orléans’ rst cousin—Valentina had grown up in a household which
her father had made “a harbor for the famous, for men skilled in all
learning and art whom he held in high honor.” She spoke Latin,
French, and German uently, and brought her own books and harp
with her to France. Thirteen hundred knights escorted her across the
Alps, her trousseau may be extrapolated from a robe embroidered
with 2,500 pearls and sprinkled with diamonds, her future
household with Louis was carpeted in Aragon leather and hung with
vermilion velvet embroidered with roses and crossbows. The
household accounts show silk sheets costing 400 francs as New
Year’s gifts, but all the luxuries could not keep melancholy from
pervading the marriage.
On the great day of the Queen’s entry, the procession advanced
along the Rue St. Denis, the main boulevard leading to the Châtelet
and to the Grand Pont over the Seine. It was a ladies’ day, with the
duchesses and great ladies riding in richly ornamented litters
escorted on either side by noble lords. Coucy escorted his daughter
Marie and her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Bar, while his wife
rode in another litter. The robes and jewels of the ladies were
masterpieces of the embroiderers’ and goldsmiths’ arts, for the King
wanted every previous ceremonial to be outdone. He had ordered
the archives of St. Denis consulted for details of the coronations of
ancient queens. The Duke of Burgundy, always a gorgeous dresser,

needed no help; he wore a doublet of velvet embroidered with forty
sheep and forty swans, each with a pearl bell around its neck.
Twelve hundred bourgeois led by the Provost lined the avenue, in
gowns of green on one side of the street and gowns of crimson on
the other. Such crowds of people had gathered to watch “as seemed
that all the world had been there.” Houses and windows the length
of the Rue St. Denis were hung with silks and tapestries, and the
street itself covered with ne fabrics “in such plenty as if they cost
nothing.”
Entering Paris through the Porte St. Denis, the procession passed
under a heavenly sky of cloth stretched over the gate, lled with
stars, beneath which children dressed as angels sang sweetly. Next
on the way was a fountain spouting red and white wines, served by
melodiously singing maidens with golden cups; then a stage erected
in front of the Church of Ste. Trinité, on which was performed the
Pas Saladin, a drama of the Third Crusade; then another rmament
full of stars “with the gure of God seated in majesty”; then “a gate
of Paradise” from which descended two angels with a crown of gold
and jewels which they placed on the head of the Queen with
appropriate song; then a curtained enclosure in front of St. Jacques
within which men played organ music. At the Châtelet a marvelous
mock castle and eld of trees had been erected as the scene of a
play dramatizing the “Bed of Justice.” Its theme was the favorite
popular belief that the King was invested with royalty in order to
maintain justice in favor of the small against the great. Amid a
urry of birds and beasts, twelve maidens with naked swords
defended the White Hart from the Lion and the Eagle.
So many wonders were to be seen and admired that it was
evening before the procession crossed the bridge leading to Notre
Dame and the climactic display. High on a tightrope slanting down
from the tower of Notre Dame to the roof of the tallest house on the
Pont St. Michel, an acrobat was poised with two lighted candles in
his hands. “Singing, he went upon the cord all along the great street
so that all who saw him had marvel how it might be.” With his
candles still burning, he was seen all over Paris and for two miles

outside. The return of the procession from the cathedral at night
was lighted by 500 torches.
The coronation and other festivities were thick with cloth of gold,
ermine, velvets, silks, crowns, jewels, and all the gorgeous glitter
that might dazzle the onlookers. A grand banquet was held in the
same hall in which Charles V had entertained the Emperor, followed
by a similar pageant (using what may have been the same props)
showing the Fall of Troy with castles and ships moving about on
wheels. At the high table with the King and Queen were seated only
prelates and eight ladies, including the Dame de Coucy and the
Duchess of Bar. The King wore his golden crown and a surcoat of
scarlet furred with ermine which, considering that it was August,
gave point to Deschamps’ advice about light clothing in summer.
Such was the crowding and heat of the hall that the Queen, who
was seven months pregnant when she went through these ve days
of continuous ceremony in mid-August, nearly fainted and the Dame
de Coucy did faint, and one table of ladies was overthrown by the
press of people. Windows were broken open to let in the air, but the
Queen and many ladies retired to their chambers.
The hot weather aected the tournaments too; so much dust was
raised by the horses’ feet that the knights complained, but the Sire
de Coucy as usual “shone brilliantly.” The King ordered 200 barrels
of water to lay the dust, “yet next day they had dust enough and too
much.”
Forty of the leading bourgeois of Paris presented the King and
Queen with gifts of jewels and vessels of gold in the hope of
remittance of taxes. Carried by two men dressed as ancient sages,
the gifts were enclosed in a litter covered by a ne silk gauze
through which the sparkle of jewels and gleam of gold could be
seen. This imaginative presentation was less persuasive than it
deserved to be. Two months later, when the King left for a tour of
the south to display his newfound sovereignty to the people and
seek to relieve their oppressions, taxes were raised in Paris as soon
as he left to pay for the cost of the Queen’s entry and for the new
journey, which in turn proved so sumptuous that it resulted not in
lowered but in increased taxes. In a manipulation of the currency to

aid the cost, the circulation of small silver coins of four pence and
twelve pence, which were the common cash of the people, was
forbidden in Paris, depriving the poor for two weeks of the means to
purchase food in the market place. Who can say whether two weeks
of hunger and anger weighed heavier in the balance than the
miraculous vision of the acrobat on his tightrope and the fountains
of running wine?

The original—“M’a souvent le poing fouci/De beaux orins a rouge escaille”—is
obscure, but may refer to the fact that coins of good value, not worn or
clipped, were often put in a bag tied at the top and sealed with colored wax,
in this case a “red seal.”

Chapter 22

C
The Siege of Barbary
oucy reached the age of fty in 1390. He was now the
leading noble, apart from the King’s brother and maternal
uncle, in the royal entourage, relied on equally for political
mission and military command. He held ocial positions as
Captain-General of Auvergne and Guienne and member of the Royal
Council, but his adventures in his ftieth year carried him far
beyond these assignments.
When in September 1389 Charles VI set out with his brother Louis
and his uncle Bourbon to confer with the Pope in Avignon and
exhibit kingship in Languedoc, Coucy commanded the royal escort.
The purpose of the journey was, rst, to work out with Pope
Clement a means of regaining sole control of the papacy, and,
second, to mend the crown’s fences in Languedoc, alienated by the
oppressions of the Duc de Berry. Delegates from the south had told
the King on their knees and in tears of the “crushing tyranny” and
“intolerable exactions” of Berry’s ocers. Unless the King acted,
they said, the 40,000 people of Languedoc who had already ed to
Aragon would be followed by many more.
Now that there was truce with England, Charles was advised by
Rivière and Mercier to make the journey in order to learn how his
subjects were governed and make himself more beloved by them,
for the sake of funds “of which he had great need.” At 22, the age at
which his father had been a mature ruler, Charles VI was a shallow
youth, spending what he did not have in a cascade of largesse.
Eorts of Treasury ocials to stem the ow by writing alongside
the names of recipients, “He has had too much” or “He should
repay,” were in vain.
Burgundy and Berry were greatly vexed to be informed by the
King that they were not to accompany him on the journey but must

remain on their own estates. Knowing that the order originated with
Rivière and Mercier, and that the King was going to “hold
inquisitions” on those who had governed Languedoc, they consulted
together and agreed that they must “dissemble this aront,” but that
the time would come “when those who have advised it shall repent
of it.” As long as they remained united, they told each other, others
“cannot do us any injury for we are the greatest personages in
France.” “Such,” writes Froissart in unblushing reconstruction, “was
the language of these two dukes.”
From Lyon, the King and his party continued the journey to
Avignon by boat down the Rhône, a more comfortable form of
travel than horseback. On such trips the royal suite would ll
several boats including one with a room containing two replaces
for the King, and others with kitchens and oces and a supply of
plate and jewels to pawn for cash if necessary on the voyage.
Charles’s passage down the rushing Rhône must have included many
stops to make himself known to towns en route, for the trip took
nine days. Organized welcome was not very dierent then than
now. As many as a thousand children dressed in the royal colors
were stationed on wooden platforms to wave little ags “and make
heard, as the King rode by, loud acclamations in his honor.”
On October 30, clad in scarlet and ermine, Charles made his entry
into the papal palace, where he was met by Clement and 26
cardinals, and attended a splendid banquet with all his party. He
presented the Pope with a blue velvet cope embroidered in pearls in
a design of angels, eur-de-lys, and stars. Empty purse or not, “he
wished to be spoken of even in foreign countries for the
magnicence he displayed.”
With no footing except in French support, Clement’s papacy
would have vanished like smoke, and the ruinous schism brought to
an end, if the French had made that their object. But they did not.
To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown
among states. States function only in terms of what those in control
perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear
blinkers. To impose Clement on Italy by power politics or force of
arms had never been feasible. It was Urban of Rome, crazy or not,

and afterward his successor who had popular support as the true
Pope. Ignoring the obvious, and the disparity between goal and
means, the French pursued their aim with the blind persistence that
amounts to frivolity.
In conferences with Clement, Charles VI and his counselors
proposed to open his way to Rome and assist him to gain control of
Italy by establishing Louis of Orléans in a revival of the cloudy
Kingdom of Adria in the north, and Louis II of Anjou in the equally
unattained Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in the south. To this end,
Louis II, brought to Avignon by his tireless mother, was given a
grand coronation as King of Naples and Sicily (including Jerusalem).
Coucy, again chosen for grace and splendor on these occasions,
performed the ceremony of serving the boy King on horseback,
along with the Count of Geneva, brother of Pope Clement.
Hardly were these arrangements completed when news was
received that the Roman Pope, Urban the terrible, had been dead for
three weeks and his seat lled in haste and secrecy by the election
of a Neapolitan cardinal, Piero Tomacelli, as Boniface IX. Rome no
more than Avignon was prepared to give up its claim in favor of a
negotiated solution. Given no chance to take advantage of Urban’s
death, the French and Clement now agreed to pursue the problem of
removing Boniface. Charles VI promised that on his return to France
he would “give attention to no other thing until he had restored the
Church to unity.”
Lighter-hearted activities engaged the King while these matters
were being resolved. He and his brother Louis and young Amadeus
of Savoy, son of the late Green Count, “being young and giddy,”
spent every night in song and dance with the ladies of Avignon, who
warmly praised the King for the many ne presents he lavished on
them. The Pope’s brother acted as master of the revels. The most
memorable of the entertainments was a literary competition on an
issue of courtly love: whether delity or inconstancy brings the
greater satisfaction. Embodied in a group of poems called the Cent
Ballades, the symposium originated among four ardent young
knights, including Boucicaut and Comte d’Eu, a cousin of the King,
who had been thrown together while on a recent venture in the

Holy Land. While temporarily imprisoned in Damascus, the four had
passed the time by a debate in verse, and on returning via Venice in
time to join the gathering at Avignon, had invited responses from
noble friends and princes.
Louis d’Orléans contributed a ballad, as did Guy de Tremolile,
Jean De Bucy, a follower of Coucy’s, and another Bastard of Coucy
named Aubert. He was Enguerrand’s former squire and rst cousin,
a son of his father’s brother, subsequently legitimized by Charles VI
after Enguerrand’s death. Nothing is known of him except that
Deschamps describes him as one of his “persecutors” among a group
overfond of wine. Although Enguerrand’s friends and adherents
entered the competition, he himself did not, which is perhaps a
minor clue to personality.
Before the advent of the printing press, literature was enjoyed like
chamber music in groups. The audience for the Cent Ballades heard
the case for delity made in the name of an elderly knight
representing Hutin de Vermeilles, a real individual known for
loyalty in love and respect for women. Hutin’s argument is the
traditional one that faithful love surpasses mere “delectation of the
body” because it improves the lover, generates courtesy to all
women for love of one, and enhances the warrior’s prowess in his
desire to rejoice the heart of his beloved. Love makes him more
valiant in siege, raids, ambush, in vanguard or defense, pilgrimage
to Jerusalem or crusade against the Turks. The case for Falsity, in
turn, was made in the name of a woman called La Guignarde, who
stresses the joys of promiscuity and the dangers of a serious liaison.
“All lovers” are then called upon to judge the dispute.
Although a majority of the noble versiers declare for Hutin and
Loyalty, some are ambiguous. The Duc de Berry, who had just
married his twelve-year-old bride, felicitates himself on having
“escaped love” and recommends talking Fidelity and practicing
Falsity. The same tone is taken by the Bastard of Coucy, who
breathes passionate devotion and eternal love in each of his stanzas,
and ends each with the refrain,
Aussi dist on, mais il n’en sera riens.

(So they say, but it comes to nothing.)
His is the most cynical of the ballads. Of the others, some are
candid, some satirical, some ambivalent, a few serious but none
expresses anything deeply felt, as they would have had the subject
been knighthood. Courtly love was an accustomed game, not a
motivating ideal to which men desperately clung and for which, like
the knights who held the lists of St. Ingelbert, they staked their
lives.
Moving on to Languedoc, Charles VI and his court made
ceremonial progress through Nîmes, Montpellier, Narbonne to
Toulouse, feted so grandly through richly decorated streets “that it
was a marvel to see.” Processions of all groups and classes, each in
appropriate robes, welcomed him, and tables were set out at which
the people could eat and drink. The King’s larder was supplied by
his subjects: at one town he was presented with a troop of sheep and
twelve fat oxen as well as twelve hunting horses hung with silver
bells. Meanwhile, his ministers inquired into conditions, ordered
reforms, and lifted the heaviest taxes.
Royal intervention staged its greatest gesture at Béziers in the
punishment of Berry’s chief ocer, the hated Bétizac. Secret
inquiries of the King’s ministers had disclosed many “atrocious acts
and such great extortions as made the whole country cry out against
him.” Upon arrest and interrogation, Bétizac insisted that all the
moneys, amounting to three million francs, had been duly paid over
to the Duc de Berry and accounted for. His papers when seized
appeared to conrm him. His conduct did not appear to warrant the
death penalty, for, as certain of the investigators said, “How can he
help it if the sums have been extravagantly spent … for this Duc de
Berry is the most covetous man alive.” Others disagreed, saying
Bétizac had so impoverished the people “that the blood of these
poor creatures cries out against him.” He should have remonstrated
with the Duke or, failing to restrain him, have informed the King
and Council.

News of Bétizac’s arrest brought a ood of public complaints
showing how much he was hated by the people, and, at the same
time, haughty letters from Berry acknowledging that all Bétizac had
done had been done at his orders. Although the King wanted the
Governor put to death, the Council was embarrassed to nd judicial
grounds for doing so, since his superior, Berry, had been appointed
by the crown.
The problem was solved by nesse. Bétizac was privately
informed that he would surely be sentenced to die and that his only
hope was to declare himself a heretic. If he did, he would be handed
over to the Church and sent for judgment to Avignon, where no one
would dare condemn him because of the Pope’s dependence on
Berry, the most powerful and zealous of his supporters. Believing
what he was told, “because those in peril of their lives are much
confused in mind,” Bétizac did as advised. He armed his guilt in
errors of faith before the Bishop of Béziers, who, according to
Church practice with confessed heretics, promptly handed him back
to the civil arm for execution. Dragged to the stake in the public
square, fastened by collar and chain and piled with faggots, Bétizac
was burned and his bones hanged, to the joy of the populace. Berry
was deprived of the lieutenancy of Languedoc and replaced by a
team of royal reformers. The people of the province acclaimed the
young King for his justice and voted him an aid of 300,000 francs.
Ambassadors from Genoa met the King at Toulouse, bringing a
proposal for a “grand and noble enterprise” against the Berber
Kingdom of Tunis. They wanted French chivalry to lead a campaign
to suppress the Barbary pirates who, with the unocial support of
their sultan, harassed Genoese commerce, raided and plundered
Sicily and the Mediterranean islands, and sold captured Christians in
their slave markets. Assuming that France, since the truce with
England, was free of inquietude, the Genoese felt that her knights,
“having nothing to do, would be glad to join in the warfare.” The
proposed objective was Mahdia,* the pirates’ main base and the best
port on the Tunisian coast. With this great stronghold in Christian

hands, the ambassadors told King Charles, the power of the Berber
kings would be broken, and they could be destroyed or converted.
Genoa oered to supply the necessary eet, provisions, archers, and
foot soldiers in return for the French combat arm—knights and
squires only, no servants—led by a prince of the royal family to
ensure a genuine commitment.
Given the indel as enemy, the proposal was dressed in all the
aura of a crusade, and doused in attery. For her historic exploits
against the indels, said the ambassadors, the name of France was
feared as far as India, enough in itself to halt Turks and Saracens.†
The indels, they warned, dominate Asia and Africa; they have
entered Europe, they threaten Constantinople, frighten Hungary,
occupy Granada. But supported by Genoa, a French campaign would
be short, and the glory long. “A ne thing for your sovereignty,”
they told Charles, “for you are the greatest King among Christians
and have so much renown.”
The project was the scheme of that “very subtle man,” Antoniotto
Adorno, Doge of Genoa, whose oppressions had raised an opposition
party among his subjects. He hoped to blunt its threat by aiding the
business enterprise of the republic, and gain at the same time a
powerful ally in case of need. While French knights were excited by
the prospect, ministers were cautious. Short of a permanent peace
with England, they disapproved of sending French strength out of
the country; and the question of leadership was bound to arouse
jealousies. Pending further consultation, the Genoese had to go
home without a rm answer.
While at Toulouse, Coucy joined the royal party in a hunt which
almost resulted in the sorely needed portrait that would have left his
face to history. The hunters lost their way in a forest as night fell.
Riding deeper and deeper into the dark maze, they could nd no
way out until the King vowed that if he escaped this peril he would
donate the price of his horse to the chapel of Notre Dame de Bonne
Espérance in the cloister of Carmes in Toulouse. In response, light
broke through the sky, a path was seen, and next day the King duly
fullled his vow, later commemorated by a fresco in the cloister

containing the only known contemporary representation of
Enguerrand de Coucy. Unfortunately, it shows no face. In the copies
that survived the demolition of the cloister in 1808, he is seen
among seven nobles in the train of the King, each identied by his
coat of arms. They are Louis d’Orléans, the Duc de Bourbon, Henri
de Navarre, Olivier de Clisson, Philippe d’Eu, Henri de Bar, and,
lastly, Coucy, the only one with his face turned away from the
viewer as if deliberately mocking posterity.
Shortly afterward he may have gone to Spain to arrange with the
King and Queen of Aragon for the marriage of their daughter,
Yolande, aged eight, to Louis II of Anjou. Froissart’s account of this
mission, which was designed to gain an ally in the Angevin quest of
the crown of Naples, is a hopeless tangle of what could and could
not have occurred. He states that Coucy escorted Anjou to an actual
marriage, which in fact did not take place until 1400, and he sets
the scene amid many other discrepancies of time and place.
Nevertheless, a marriage contract was indeed concluded in 1390,
and Coucy would have been the natural choice to negotiate it. The
Duchesse d’Anjou had consistently sought his inuence in her cause
ever since her husband’s death; moreover, Coucy was related by
marriage and well known to the Queen of Aragon, who was the
former Yolande de Bar, his son-in-law’s sister. He had also served as
proxy in young Louis’ previous marriage to Bernabò Visconti’s
daughter, which had been neatly annulled when Bernabò fell from
power.
In Froissart’s version, the Duchesse d’Anjou entreated Coucy to
escort her son to Spain and he “cheerfully agreed” to undertake the
journey. Twelve-year-old Louis took leave of the Pope and his
mother in tears, for “their hearts were wrung at the separation and
it was uncertain when they should meet again.” Coucy and his
charge rode by land to Barcelona (250 miles or more from Avignon
or 200 from Toulouse) and on their arrival the Queen of Aragon was
“particularly pleased to see the Sire de Coucy” and thanked young
Louis of Anjou for bringing him, saying that “everything would be
the better for it.” All this is natural enough although it probably did
not happen; the fog of elapsed time has closed down over the facts.

If indeed he went to Spain, Coucy would have seen a country on
the edge of turmoil. The peninsula below the Pyrenees was now
experiencing the tail of the storm of insurrections that had swept
through Europe a decade before. The long civil wars between Pedro
the Cruel and his half-brother Enrique had trailed the ineluctable
wake of pillage, oppression, and taxes. Social anatagonism found
vent against the Jews, who so regularly in history become a
microcosm of the world’s larger ills. In Spain their role had been
more prominent and prosperous than elsewhere. Pedro the Cruel
had employed them extensively as advisors and agents, besides
keeping a Jewish mistress, and his preference was made a theme of
Enrique’s accusations until Enrique emerged the victor. Then he too
used the Jews’ nancial services.
Popular hatred was inamed by agitators who raised fears of the
Jews’ increasing inuence and demanded cancellation of debts owed
to Christ-killers. Given a religious motive, economic fear can rise to
fury. A fanatic Archdeacon, Ferran Martínez, preached a version of
Hitler’s nal solution. In 1391 murder, seizure of property, and
forcible conversion of the Jews began, and this taste of violence
soon turned into general insurrection against the clergy and
propertied class, culminating in four days of terror in Barcelona.
Protection of the Jews was denounced by the populace as treason to
Christendom. Gradually, the rulers regained the upper hand, but
aggression against the Jews had been too overt and physically
damaging to be repaired. They were rendered vulnerable, and Spain
susceptible, to the nal expulsion one hundred years later.
Coucy is recorded again in Toulouse on January 5, 1390, and on
January 28 appeared in Avignon, where he testied at hearings in
behalf of the canonization of a French saint. The candidate was the
nobly born Pierre de Luxemburg, a youth of great sanctity and great
family, recently deceased at seventeen, whose nomination was
intended to enhance the status of the French Pope. Clement’s
legitimacy could hardly be questioned if God had provided a saint
within his sphere. Pierre’s name had been put forward under the

highest auspices, rst by the Duchesse d’Anjou in 1388, then by the
new Chancellor of the University of Paris, Pierre d’Ailly, in the name
of the King.
A son of the chaste and pious Count Guy de St. Pol, who had died
of the plague as a hostage in England, and of Jeanne de Luxemburg
of the same family as the late Emperor Charles IV, Pierre had been
orphaned at three and rather precociously renounced the esh in an
oath of perpetual chastity at six. He was said to have imposed the
same vow on a twelve-year-old sister and to have reproached his
brother for laughing, on the ground that the Gospels recorded that
Jesus had wept but not laughed. At eight he was an overgrown,
hollow-chested ascetic, who was sent to study in Paris, where he
practiced fasting and self-agellation and demanded to enter the
austere and currently fashionable Célestin Order. Opposed in this
wish by his guardians, he regularly visited the Order to share its
bread and water and sleep on the bare ground fully clothed without
removing belt or shoes in order to be ready for prayers at midnight
without losing time.
His remarkable piety combined with high birth won him
appointment as a canon at nine, as archdeacon some years later, as
Bishop of Metz at fteen and Cardinal at sixteen. The red robe did
not discourage his austerities or lonely orisons. His life was “nothing
but humility” and “always he ed from the vanities and superuities
of the world.” He spent the greater part of the day and night in
solitary prayer or in writing down his sins in a notebook by
candlelight and confessing them twice a day to his chaplain. His
urgency, like Catherine of Siena’s loquacity, was sometimes too
much for the chaplain, who occasionally feigned sleep when he
heard Pierre knocking on his door in the middle of the night.
The boy Cardinal developed a faculty for miraculous cures: he
was credited with saving the Duchesse de Bourbon from labor pains
lasting two weeks, healing wounds suered in a tournament by Guy
de Tremolile, resurrecting a steward of the Duc de Bourbon who had
been felled by a thunderbolt, and outside this rather limited circle,
restoring to health a poor workman who had been tortured by

brigands. When he died of consumption and self-imposed rigors in
1387, he was buried by his wish in the paupers’ cemetery at
Avignon, where his grave became an object of pilgrimage by the
poor and sick, causing a “great marvel” at the visitations made there
daily. Kings and nobles, including the Sire de Coucy, sent rich gifts
and lamps of silver, and Froissart, who never missed the
newsworthy, came to observe the crowds at the grave.
To ensure a foolproof case for canonization, the hearings on
Pierre’s qualications lasted six months and took evidence from 72
witnesses on 285 dierent articles. As Witness Eight in the rst
week, Coucy testied from personal knowledge, telling how, when
Pierre went to take possession of the Bishopric of Metz, he had
required the men-at-arms of his brother, Count Waleran de Pol, to
evict the Urbanist clerics who held the episcopal property. When
Waleran demanded to be reimbursed from the revenues of the
bishopric, Pierre had said he would rather die than bind the lands of
the Church, whereupon such discord arose between the brothers
that Coucy himself had to take custody of the Church property until
a settlement could be reached. He added that he had known Pierre
from childhood and marveled at his piety, nor had he ever seen at
Avignon a youth of such virtue.
All the roll of witnesses was not enough. Whether Clement’s own
unholiness quailed before a question of sainthood or he hesitated for
some other reason, he let the process lapse, and his own reputation
as Anti-Pope kept it from being revived for 140 years. Pierre de
Luxemburg was ultimately beatied but not canonized in 1527.
In company with the King and court, Coucy returned to Paris via
Dijon, where the Duke of Burgundy was prepared to “dissemble”—
as he did everything—in a very grand manner, with a view to
restoring himself to favor. An entire book has been written about
the festivities, liveries, banquets, tournaments, gifts, and costs of
this occasion, but amidst the accumulating troubles of the 14th
century these extravaganzas recur so regularly that astonishment
fades.

Incidental to displaying political status, such festivities must have
supplied economic stimulus. For the King’s visit to Burgundy,
tailors, embroiderers, goldsmiths, armorers, and all trades and crafts
received orders for goods and services. The Duke alone ordered 320
new lances to present to competitors. All the towns of Burgundy
which the King would visit en route received funds for cleaning and
decorating and even repaving streets and squares. Dijon itself, with
its forest of spires and bell towers and chimneys tted with iron
grills to keep storks from nesting, its narrow twisting streets and
taverns of ill repute, had to begin by clearing away animal ordure.
Dogs, cats, pigs, and sheep wandered freely through its dark wooden
arcades, the pigs especially contributing to the lth and smells.
Voracious feeders, quarrelsome and “unsociable,” they were the
subject of constant complaints for biting and, in one case, eating a
child, for which the guilty animal was executed by hanging.
Regulations prohibiting the keeping of pigs in the city and the
disposal of their ordure in the river had little eect.
Because there was no hall large enough to accommodate all the
guests, a gigantic tent requiring 30,100 ells of cloth was ordered to
cover the palace courtyard. Thriftily, after the event, the cloth was
cut up and sold in lots. The amount of fabric consumed for blue
satin draperies to be hung in all the ducal rooms, for 300 gowns of
silk and damask for attending ladies, and as many doublets of parti-
colored velvet and satin for the knights, must have emptied
Flanders. How many needlewomen were employed to embroider the
draperies with the Duke’s “Il me tarde” entwined with his wife’s
initials against a background of azure doves perched in a forest of
orange and lemon trees? How many carpenters and laborers found
work razing walls, cutting down trees, attening the ground, and
constructing covered grandstands for three days of tournaments in
February weather? When the host alone had thirty war-horses on
hand for the events, the total number would have required an army
of grooms and stable hands. Jongleurs, actors of miracle plays,
acrobats, and animal trainers ocked to the town to entertain the
people while the nobles jousted.

Coucy, even at fty, was a—or possibly the—prize-winner of the
tournament, receiving a pearl-and-sapphire clasp from the Duchess
in reward. In the farewell exchange of gifts (and careful account was
kept of the price tag of each), Burgundy upstaged the King by giving
him a more expensive present than the King gave to the Duchess.
The ceremonies concluded with singing and dancing by the ladies
and damsels, “for love of the King, the Duc de Touraine [Orléans],
the Duc de Bourbon and the Sire de Coucy.”
Soon after Charles’s return to Paris, his promise to think of
nothing but reuniting the Church was put aside in favor of Genoa’s
alluring enterprise against the Kingdom of Barbary. Here was a
ready-made adventure with no need of the serious political
maneuvering required in the papal cause. Crusade, even if it had
little to do with the cross, gave prestige to the participants, not to
mention the privilogium crucis allowing a moratorium on their debts
and immunity from lawsuit. While “the re of valor enamed all
hearts,” certain cautions were observed: the Council limited the
number of knights who could leave the country to 1,500, and none
could go without the King’s leave. All who joined were to equip
themselves at their own expense and recruit no followers from
outside their own domains.
Louis d’Orléans, bent on replacing his uncle of Burgundy as the
dominant gure of the realm, wanted the command and showered
gifts on inuential nobles in the hope of acquiring it. His uncle
exerted enough inuence to keep it from him, on the grounds of
Louis’ youth and inexperience, thus adding more fuel to their
rivalry. Burgundy had too many interests at stake at home to want
to leave the country; Berry was out of favor and not a warrior. The
Duc de Bourbon, eager to nd glory in the footsteps of St. Louis,
who had died on the shores of Tunis in his last crusade, was
accordingly chosen, with Coucy as second in command.
In the gesture of a great prince, Coucy established a church and
monastery before his departure. Since the religious life was
acknowledged as superior to the secular, the founding of a religious
institution was a way of partaking in the extra merit of the Church.
Besides, as the Duke of Burgundy said when he founded a

Carthusian monastery at Champmol in 1385, “For the soul’s
salvation nothing suces like the prayers of pious monks.”
Coucy chose the Célestin Order, whose extremities of renunciation
had made it so paradoxically the favorite of a nobility steeped in
worldliness. Was the preference indeed paradox, or was it spiritual
discomfort and a need for penitence in a life so far removed from
the principles it professed? The duality of life under the Christian
faith showed itself in Louis d’Orléans’ hastening from riches and
pleasures and political intrigue to stony vigils in the Célestin
cloister. Sharing the monks’ austerities relieved the pricking of self-
disgust. Even the Count of Foix, a hard-headed materialist well
acquainted with wrath, vainglory, and other sins, composed his own
“Book of Prayers” in which he acknowledged the great suering that
results from coming to believe that “God no longer exists and that
good and evil fortunes come from the nature of things, without God
being there. After that comes death, the death of body and soul.”
Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by
the anxiety it generated. In this anxiety, Chaucer toward the end of
his life, in his envoy to the Parson’s Tale, was moved to “revoke” his
life’s work—The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of
the Duchess, and all the poems that were not pious—and to beg
Christ to forgive him for writing these “worldly vanities … so that I
may be one of those at the day of doom that shall be saved.”
Christianity held a tragic power indeed if the need for salvation
could lead a man to recant his own creation.
The 13th century founder of the Célestin Order had as a youth
chosen a hermit’s life in a cave in order to devote himself to God
while achieving the most complete renunciation of self and nature
compatible with life. He had spent sixteen hours a day in prayer,
wearing a hair shirt and fasting on water and cabbage leaves
through six “Lents” of forty days each during the year. Attracting
disciples and fame, he succumbed to election as Pope Célestin V;
then, in bitter repentance, and in an act unique for the papacy,
resigned, to return to self-aiction and the search for God. The
order named for him, growing in favor with popes and kings, was
exempted from tithes and authorized to grant 200 years of

indulgences to truly penitential persons who visited its convents on
holy days.
There is no evidence that Coucy made a habit of visits to the
Order and none at all to suggest that he was a man troubled in
spirit. In all likelihood, his choice did not reect any burden of
anxiety so much as the fact that the greater austerities practiced by
the Célestin monks gave greater assurance of salvation to their
patrons.
His charter, dated April 26, 1390, opens with the characteristic
self-assurance of the Coucys: “Considering that the pilgrimage and
the temporal and worldly goods of this transitory life are ordered
among those who can, and know how, best to use and edify them,
and to store up treasure for God who has loaned us these goods,”
and for the purpose of perpetual prayers for himself, his present
wife, his ancestors and successors and all knights and ladies of his
Order of the Crown, he ordains and establishes a monastery for
twelve monks of the Célestin Order on his property at Villeneuve on
the banks of the Aisne outside Soissons.
He endowed the monastery with 400 livres of annual income
secured to the said Order by a copious variety of legal safeguards.
And if at any time the income falls short of 400 livres, he species
how the sum shall be made up so that the monks shall “peaceably
possess the said revenues without any constraint of mortgage by us
or our successors.” In any future disputes, the monks shall have “the
counsel, comfort and aid of us and our ocers of justice, our
councillors and servants as if it were our own quarrel.” The
Célestins evidently had a sharp lawyer working on the deed or else
Coucy himself was taking great pains in the perpetual attempt of
donors to outank the future.
The foundation remained very much on his mind in coming years.
When the buildings were still unnished after a certain time, he
added another 200 livres of annual income to bring them to
completion. Later still he made over to the Célestins a ne large
mansion in Soissons belonging to the confrérie of Archers in order
that the monks might have a place of shelter in time of war and be
enabled to continue the monastic life, which, judging from another

gift, had increased in comfort. Informed that the monks had not
enough wine—which their predecessors had done without—
Enguerrand arranged for them to buy a vineyard large enough to
provide a sucient annual supply. Owing to a failure to sign the
charter for this gift before his death, the vineyard was to become
one of the monastery’s several claims in an acrimonious suit against
his heirs.
The noblest of the kingdom assembled for the enterprise against
Barbary, joined by knights from Hainault and Flanders as well as an
English party from Calais headed by the Duke of Lancaster’s bastard
son, John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, progenitor of the Tudor line.
Clisson the Constable stayed behind to guard the country and leave
his opponent Burgundy no free hand. Otherwise the group included,
besides Bourbon and Coucy, all the great names: Admiral de Vienne;
Comte d’Eu, whose prominence was owed to family rank; Jean
d’Harcourt VII; Philippe de Bar, brother of Coucy’s son-in-law;
Georey Boucicaut, brother of the more famous Jean; Yvain, bastard
son of the Count of Foix; and a notable Gascon called the Soudic de
la Trau, “one of the valiant knights of the world.”
The King nanced Bourbon to the extent of 12,000 francs and
distributed more than 20,000 among the other lords. Bourbon
borrowed another 20,000 from Louis d’Orléans, secured against the
revenues of his estates. Coucy, who had just been paid 6,000 francs
by the crown to cover his expenses in Avignon and Languedoc, and
had borrowed 10,000 more from Louis d’Orléans, was “better
supported than any” except Bourbon. He and Comte d’Eu brought,
evidently between them, a following of 200 knights. Pope Clement
gave a plenary indulgence, which was generous considering that his
own purpose had been deected, and perhaps overgenerous since it
was supposed to apply only to a crusade for the recovery of
Jerusalem. Indeed, except for Jerusalem, according to the honest
Bonet, war “should not be made against unbelievers,” because God
had made the world for all and “we cannot and ought not to

constrain or force unbelievers to receive Holy Baptism or the Holy
Faith.”
The French party met their Genoese transports at Marseille, from
where they sailed to Genoa to take on provisions, archers and foot
soldiers, and the foreign knights. The knights and squires numbered
between 1,400 and 1,500 and the total force probably about 5,000,
not counting perhaps 1,000 sailors to man some forty galleys and
twenty cargo ships. Bourbon, Coucy, Comte d’Eu and the valiant
Soudic went ashore to be entertained by the Doge of Genoa, who
presented them with gifts of spices, syrups, prunes of Damascus, and
“other liqueurs good for sickness.” These did not make up for a
shortfall in provisions. Bourbon had to supply an added 200 casks of
wine, 200 itch of bacon, and 2,000 chickens for the sick and
wounded. Shortage of space required that many horses be left
behind, which, to spare their upkeep, had to be sold at less than half
their value. At the nal moment, embarrassment arose as to which
clergy should bless the eet since Genoa and France acknowledged
dierent papacies. For the convenience of war, allies might bridge
the schism. In the end, two priests ociated, representing both
popes.
These diculties overcome, the imposing armada that prepared
to sail on July 1, 1390, was a thrilling spectacle and for long
afterward a favorite subject of the illuminators. Needless to name
the verbal illuminator who wrote, “What a beautiful thing it is to
see this eet with the emblazoned banners of dierent lords
glittering in the sun and uttering in the wind, and to hear, when
the musicians blow their clarions and trumpets, the sound of those
voices carried and echoed over the sea.”
Ill fortune was encountered almost at once when a furious storm
o Elba dispersed the eet and caused a delay of nine days before
all were collected again at the rendezvous at Malta. In the last week
of July the eet sailed up to Mahdia, located on the downward
curve of the north African coast 100 miles south and east of Tunis.
The walled town stood at the center and highest point of a narrow
mile-long peninsula, its well-fortied harbor defended by a chain
and towers equipped with stone-hurling machines.

The invaders decided to send ashore a landing party under Coucy,
to act as advance guard and distract the enemy while the main party
landed next day. With the young and excitable Comte d’Eu as
associate leader, Coucy’s party of 600 to 800 men-at-arms supported
by Genoese archers set forth in beach landing craft powered by oars.
As the rowers thrust their vessels over the calm sea, the waters,
partaking of the pathetic fallacy long before its time, “seemed to
delight in bearing these Christians to the shores of the indels.”
Landing craft usually carried up to twenty horses, whose riders
mounted while on board and, with helmet down and lance in hand,
landed through wide doors at the stern, charged the enemy, and if
pursued, rode back aboard their vessel, which was then rowed out
to sea again.
Coucy was the rst ashore and drew up his party in battle
formation to meet attack. None came. Warned of the coming
invasion and believing his force inferior in arms to the Christians,
the Berber Sultan Abou-’l-Abbas had decided to allow a landing
without risking a ght. Thereafter, avoiding general battle, he
would let the invaders wear themselves out against stone walls
under the August sun while keeping them constantly harassed by
glancing attacks until exhaustion, heat, failing supplies, and
inability to bring up reinforcements defeated their eorts. It was the
same strategy that Charles V had devised against the English, and
that many times since then had served the defense well.
Condent of victory over the despised indels, the crusaders
established their camp of bright-colored tents before the city, with
Bourbon’s pavilion ying the eur-de-lys at the center and the
Genoese crossbowmen on the wings. They could blockade Mahdia
by sea and by land across the waist of the peninsula, but the city
had stored up some provisions and had access to fresh water
through underground canals. Shaped like a triangle, it harbored a
large population and a garrison of 6,000, supposedly in
underground living quarters. Knowing that if Mahdia fell, the
Christians could march unobstructed to the conquest of Tunisia, the
Sultan had strengthened Mahdia’s defenses at all points and called

upon the aid of neighboring kings to assemble a eld army in the
hinterland.
For three days no move interrupted the invaders’ siege
preparations until on the third evening the Berbers suddenly poured
with erce yells from the fortress. Thanks to an alert system of
guards around the Christian camp, they were thrown back, leaving
300 dead. The city resumed its silent resistance while the Christians,
to prevent the horsemen from again dashing in, erected a four-foot-
high barrier of stakes held together by rope, with crossed oars and
lances serving as cover for archers, and guards posted every 120
feet.
From a distance the sound of drums and clarions signaled the
approach of the Saracens’ relief army, reported to number 40,000.
Camping behind the city, they ventured no major oensive but kept
up a series of stinging raids on swift horses, descending on the
Christians when the sun was hottest, forcing them into combat in
their heavy armor. The Europeans were “almost burned up” inside
their steel while the Berbers wore cuirasses of quilted cloth or
leather. If pursued, they dispersed rapidly, only to regroup and
pursue the enemy, who, burdened by armor, lost many dead. Almost
every day and sometimes at night for the next six to seven weeks,
the skirmishes continued.
Genoese ships supplied the Christian camp by sea with provisions
from Sicily and Calabria, but deliveries were irregular, leaving
privation during the gaps. The heavy wine imported by the Genoese
caused lethargy. Heat and thirst, wounds and fevers, and illness
from bad water—the same conditions, except for plague, suered by
the crusade of St. Louis—preyed upon the besiegers. Swarms of
insects as well as the impregnability of the town depressed their
spirits. They tried to ration provisions and to encourage one
another. “The Sire de Coucy in particular,” according to loyal
Froissart, “looked after the welfare of the poorer knights and squires
whereas the Duc de Bourbon was indierent, and sat cross-legged in
front of his pavilion requiring everyone to address him through a
third person with many reverences, not caring whether the lesser
knights were embarrassed. The Sire de Coucy, by contrast, put them

at ease. He was kind to all and behaved more graciously than the
Duc de Bourbon who never conversed with the foreign knights and
squires in the agreeable manner of the Sire de Coucy.”
Having brought no battering rams to break down walls, the
besiegers began construction of a huge assault tower on wheels. It
was three stories high, to overtop Mahdia’s walls, and forty feet
square with enclosed sides. Meanwhile, the defenders, suering
from the blockade, sent envoys to parley. Conducted before Bourbon
and Coucy, who listened attentively to the speech as translated by a
Genoese, the envoys asked why the French and English knights had
come to make war on those who had not harmed them. They said
they had troubled only the Genoese, which was natural among
neighbors, for it had been customary “to seize mutually all we can
from each other.”
The answer required care to be sure of making a good case for a
just war. Bourbon and Coucy consulted with twelve of the leading
lords and, evidently on the assumption that indels were ignorant,
replied that they came to make war on the Saracens because they
were unbelievers “with no creed of their own,” which made them
enemies, and also to retaliate upon their forefathers “for having
crucied and put to death the son of God called Jesus Christ.”
“At this answer the Saracens did nothing but laugh, saying it was
the Jews who had crucied Jesus Christ and not they.” The parley
evidently ended there.
Subsequently, a Berber and a Christian, meeting outside the walls,
entered a dispute—probably not spontaneous, because the Berbers
were looking for a way to take prisoners—on the relative merit of
their religions. The Berber oered a challenge to decide the issue by
the combat of ten champions from each side. Instantly responding,
ten crusaders, including Guy and Guillaume de Tremolile, Georey
Boucicaut, and two English knights, presented themselves, while the
camp buzzed in excited anticipation of the event. Only Coucy
disapproved.
“Hold your tongues, you who never consider consequences,” he
said. “I see no advantage in this combat.” Suppose the Saracens
were to send not knights but mere varlets, what honor or advantage

would be gained in defeating them? Suppose the challenge were a
ruse to seize Christian knights as prisoners, of which they had so far
taken none? Such a ght could not take Mahdia, whatever its
outcome. Moreover, a trial at arms, especially with an unfamiliar
enemy, should never be accepted without great deliberation nor
without authority of the Senior Council and full knowledge of the
challengers’ identity by name and surname, rank and arms. Coucy
rebuked the champions for indiscipline and for failure of the
subordination to high command which ought to prevail in an army.
In that concept he was ahead of his countrymen.
Although his advice won many adherents, others supported Comte
d’Eu and Philippe de Bar, who insisted that the challenge, having
been accepted, could not be disavowed and that combat must ensue.
Led by Georey Boucicaut, who in his “overowing pride” oered
to ght with twenty against forty, the champions duly rode forth in
their armor to the appointed time and place. A throng of their
comrades accompanied them, increasing in numbers by the moment
until virtually all the able-bodied were present, leaving the camp
guarded only by the sick under the command of Coucy. Seeing such
numbers, the Berber champions preferred not to appear.
Intending to prevent the clash, doubtless on Coucy’s advice, the
Duc de Bourbon hurries up on his mule, to nd himself surrounded
by several thousand excited warriors. Fearing that he will not be
obeyed if he orders retreat, he decides to let the occasion govern.
Beginning with an attack on the enemy camp, battle is joined and
ercely waged. The Christians harm but cannot destroy the greatly
superior Saracen army, and, suocating in their armor, themselves
suer many losses. They are bathed in sweat, gasping for breath
through open mouths and dilated nostrils, devoured by thirst. The
wounded breathe their last in the arms of their comrades; the
exhausted sink to the ground to lie motionless. By twilight even
D’Eu counsels retreat on the ground that if the Saracens charge the
camp, “there is no one there but the Sire de Coucy with a few men
and many sick; they could all be lost,” and the camp overrun.
Accounts dier widely as to casualties: two knights and four
squires, according to Bourbon’s biographer; no less than sixty, many

of whom he names, according to Froissart. Whatever the number,
they were lost in a pointless battle.
Frustration compounded the physical miseries of a siege that had
lasted two months without result. Talk of raising the siege was
heard. Grumblers said that skirmishing could never take the town.
For every one of the enemy slain, ten could take his place because
the Saracens were in their own country. Winter was coming with
long and cold nights, and suspicion rose that the Genoese, “who are
rude people and traitors,” might desert, sailing away by night in
their ships. Impatient at the long lapse in trade, the Genoese were
indeed growing restless. They said they had expected the French to
take Mahdia within two weeks but, as matters were going, they
would never conquer the town, much less Tunisia, this year or next.
Amid these doubts and discontents, a War Council was convened
which agreed on a nal major eort to take Mahdia by assault.
The day was carnage. Resistance of the Saracen eld army, led by
the Sultan’s sons, was intense. Mahdia’s garrison, ghting “in the
certitude of a glorious reward in the other world,” poured from the
walls a shower of arrows, stones, and burning oil which succeeded
in destroying the crusaders’ great assault tower. Men-at-arms on
ladders climbed to the very brink of the walls to be toppled back.
Despite the strongest assaults, which almost carried one of the city’s
three gates, Mahdia could not be taken. The Berber eld army was
repelled, but, as so often in France, the walled city withstood its
enemies.
Afterward, both sides were ready to end hostilities. The
beleaguered Berbers, suering invasion and blockade, had no
advantage in prolonging war on their own soil. With their lighter
arms and tactics, they could not hope for decisive victory in the
eld. The Genoese instigators of the enterprise were more than
ready for withdrawal. While they negotiated terms with the Berbers,
the invaders struck camp. Bright banners came down, tents were
rolled up, withdrawal to the ships was completed nine weeks after
the landing. “As you were the rst to land, good cousin,” said
Bourbon to Coucy, “I wish to be the last to embark”—a less exigent
choice.

The treaty concluded by the Genoese secured terms which the
French were able to declare honorable, allowing them to depart
without shame, if without victory. Indeed, at the last War Council
held to discuss the terms, they convinced themselves they had done
well. To maintain a siege for two months against three Saracen
kings and a strong city, said the Soudic de la Trau, was a thing “as
honorable as if I had been in three battles.” Other speakers gladly
took his cue, and all, including Coucy, agreed to accept the terms.
One more enterprise, the fourth since the Scottish asco, had
ended in vain, not for lack of will or courage or ghting capacity,
but from the headlong undertaking of a militarily impractical task.
The strength of walls against men, the problems of siege to the
besieger, the risks of overseas supply were as well known to knights
as the inside of their helmets. They could have known the
conditions of North Africa from the rout of St. Louis’ two crusades,
regardless of the time elapsed; 120 years ago was but yesterday
insofar as change was expected. Military carelessness had some
excuse, however. In a period of poor communication, advance
intelligence was usually lacking. Mahdia’s fortied strength could
well have been unsuspected. Ignorance of the foe was a condition of
the time; contempt for this foe, a condition of its mentality.
Froissart claimed that knights said to him afterward, “If the Sire
de Coucy had been in command, the result would have been
dierent.” This is unlikely. Although lack of command structure
played a part in the outcome, what principally vitiated the siege of
Barbary was lack of a vital interest. When that was present, when
the stakes were serious, as in the recovery of France under Charles
V, a strategy compatible with its object was imposed, recklessness
and improvidence disallowed. For the French, the Tunisian
campaign was merely chivalric adventure with a religious overlay.
What moved knights to war was desire to do deeds of valor
augmented by zeal for the faith, not the gaining of a political end by
force of arms. They were concerned with the action, not the goal—
which was why the given goal was so rarely attained.
In France, where no word had been received of the expedition’s
fate, processions and prayers were held to implore God’s mercy on

the crusaders who fought in His name. Charles VI visited Coucy-le-
Château in September, perhaps to comfort the young Dame de
Coucy in her anxiety, or to inspect again a property coveted by the
crown and which might soon be lordless. Rejoicing was loud when
news came of the crusaders’ return to Genoa in mid-October. More
of the sick died there and others recovered slowly from their
hardships. After a winter’s crossing of the Alps, it was another six
weeks before Bourbon and Coucy reached Paris, followed from time
to time by their companions.
Interval and distance muted the truth. Despite a return without
booty, ransom, or prisoners, they were greeted as if victorious (as
were their opponents in Moslem halls). As far as France knew to the
contrary, an impression of triumph over the indel could prevail.
There were no foreign correspondents in Tunisia to report, and no
newspapers in France to publish, the frustrations of the campaign.
Losses in killed and missing amounting to 274 knights and squires,
or just short of 20 percent, left no negative impression; they were
customary. In the end, France was admired for the undertaking, not
least by Genoa, because the appearance of the French as her ghting
allies suciently alarmed the Berbers to cause them for the present
to reduce their piracy.
Eager to hear all that had happened, King Charles questioned
Bourbon and Coucy and the rest. Not the least discouraged by their
accounts, he declared that as soon as peace could be made with
England and within the Church, he would gladly go with a royal
army to those parts “to exalt the Christian faith and confound the
indels.” Among the participants, memories of pain and futility
faded, and when within a few years a new crusade was preached
against the Turks, their attitude toward the foe was unchanged and
their enthusiasm undeterred.

Called “Africa” or “Aurique” by the Europeans of the time, and sometimes
confused by them with Carthage, the ancient Tunis.

† Saracen was a term used indiscriminately for all Moslems, whether Berbers,
Arabs, Moors, or Turks.

Chapter 23

U
In a Dark Wood
ndiscouraged by the equivocal result in Barbary, the French
King and Council moved without pause to a more
formidable venture: ending the schism by force of arms. The
plan for a march on Rome to oust Pope Boniface and install
Pope Clement was called the Voie de Fait, or Way of the Deed—that
is, of force—as opposed to the Way of Cession, or voluntary mutual
abdication of the popes, as advocated by the University. To march
through Italy and take Rome by force was no less an undertaking
than the invasion of England—so recently proved beyond French
powers—but the policy-makers showed no hesitation. The Council
took the decision at the end of November within a few days of
Coucy’s and Bourbon’s return from Tunisia.
The plan was presented to the King as a prelude to crusade. He
could not in good conscience, his ministers told him, take the cross
against the Turks until the Church was reunited. “We can envision
nothing ner nor more reasonable for you than to go to Rome with
the power of men-at-arms and destroy this anti-pope Boniface.…
Nothing could better occupy you. We may hope that this anti-pope
and his cardinals, when they realize that you are coming against
them with a strong army, will surrender to your mercy.” After that
grand consummation, the glowing prospect of continuing even to
Jerusalem would be at hand.
When could he start? asked the King, immediately are. He had
been brought up under the ardent inuence of Mézières, who had
lled the court with his propaganda of crusade as France’s destiny
and the saving of society. Charles’s advisers told him the campaign
could begin at once, and plans were immediately set in motion. All
the royal house were to be included; even the Duke of Brittany was

invited because “they did not think it prudent to leave him behind.”
He predicted unpleasantly that the enterprise would “end in words.”
A huge force of 12,000 lances was agreed upon, with departure
set four months hence in March 1391 from a rendezvous at Lyon.
The King and his brother were to lead 4,000 lances; Burgundy,
Berry, and the Constable each 2,000; Bourbon and Coucy each
1,000; all to receive three months’ pay in advance. The taxes
required to raise such an army and maintain it in the eld seem to
have been lightly considered; nancing the venture was as
unrealistic as the Way of Force itself. When the Council met to
authorize the rates, the usual omen in the form of a fearful storm
made them hesitate. Was it God’s signal against imposing new
burdens on an already overburdened people?
The voice of the University spoke against the Voie de Fait more
explicitly than lightning and thunder. In a stupendous twelve-hour
sermon preached before the King and court on January 6, 1391,
Jean Gerson, a young scholar already famed as a preacher,
expressed the opposition. Twenty-seven years old and two years
short of his doctorate in theology, Gerson was a protégé of the
Chancellor Pierre d’Ailly, whom he was soon to succeed at the age
of 31. As the struggle over the schism intensied, he was to become
the foremost advocate of the supremacy of a Church Council over
the Pope, and the most memorable French theologian of his age.
Gerson was a man proof against classication or generalization. A
mystic in faith, he was rational in practice. As a lover of the golden
mean, he distrusted the devotional excesses of other mystics and
visionaries. As a churchman, he was both conformist and non-
conformist. Humane in ideas, he harshly opposed the early French
humanists in the great debate over the Roman de la Rose. Despite his
dislike of visionaries, especially female, he was to be, in the last
year of his life, one of only two theologians willing to guarantee the
authenticity of the voices of Joan of Arc. This was not because he
was what moderns would call a liberal, but because he understood
the intensity of her religious faith. He was a compendium and a
reector of the ideas and intellectual inuences of his age.

In earlier times he would have been a monk, but in the last
hundred years the university had taken over from the monastery the
main work of transmitting the knowledge of the past and pursuing it
in the present. Entering the University of Paris at fourteen, Gerson
had found theology and philosophy petried in the arid syllogisms
of the scholastics. In the great age of Aquinas, scholasticism had
undertaken to answer all questions of faith by reason and logic, but
reason had proved incapable of explaining God and the universe,
and the eort faded, leaving only a hard shell of argument by logic,
practiced, as Petrarch said in disgust, by “hoary-headed children.”
When theybegin to “spew forth syllogisms,” he advised taking ight.
Gerson, like others of his troubled time, craved something more
meaningful for the soul and found the alternative in mystic faith and
direct communion with God.
He believed that society could be regenerated only through a
renewal and deepening of faith in which “vain curiosity” had no
place. Knowledge of God, he wrote, “is better acquired by penitent
feeling than by intellectual investigation.” He took the same view of
the supernatural, arming the existence of demons and reproving
those who scoed for lack of faith and the “infection of reason.” Yet
Gerson could not keep reason from breaking in. He scorned magic
and astrologers’ superstitions, and recommended careful
examination of visions before giving them credence.
He disapproved of the Bible in the vernacular, yet, as a poet,
teacher, and orator, he wrote many of his sermons and treatises in
French so as to convey his meaning to simple minds and youthful
understanding. Medieval educators in general spent much time
composing sermons for children. Gerson in particular was concerned
with their development, and uncommon in seeing them as persons
distinct from adults. In a curriculum for Church schools, he urged
the necessity of keeping a vigil lamp lit in the youngest children’s
dormitory to serve as a symbol of faith and to give light when
“natural necessity” required their rising during the night.
Reformation of the Church, he warned, must begin with the right
teaching of children, and reform of the colleges begin with reform of
elementary schools.

He advised confessors to arouse a sense of guilt in children with
regard to their sexual habits so that they might recognize the need
for penitence. Masturbation, even without ejaculation, was a sin
that “takes away a child’s virginity even more than if at the same
age he had gone with a woman.” The absence of a sense of guilt
about it in children was a situation that must be changed. They
must not hear coarse conversation or be allowed to kiss and fondle
each other nor sleep in the same bed with the opposite sex, nor with
adults even of the same sex. Gerson had six sisters, all of whom
chose to remain unmarried in holy virginity. Some powerful family
inuence was surely at work here from which this strong
personality emerged.
Sex was one factor in Gerson’s violent rejection of Jean de
Meung’s Roman de la Rose. Meung’s celebration of carnal love, his
satire of Chastity, his enthronement of Reason, his free-thinking
skepticism, his anti-clerical bias were all anathema to Gerson. When
Christine de Pisan voiced her attack on Jean de Meung in 1399 in
her Epistle to the God of Love, Gerson supported it in a sermon with
all the passion of the book-burner. He denounced the Roman de la
Rose as pernicious and immoral: it degraded women and made vice
attractive. If he had the only copy in existence, he said, and it were
worth 1,000 livres, he would not hesitate to consign it to the ames.
“Into the re, good people, into the re!”
Admirers of Meung sprang to his defense in open letters to
Christine and Gerson. The defenders, Jean de Montreuil, Gontier
and Pierre Col, were clerics and scholars in the secretarial service of
the crown. Together with like-minded academics, they were among
those who had chosen another path than Gerson in reaction to the
dusty answers of the scholastics. With their faith in human reason
and recognition of natural instincts they were acknowledging the
lay spirit. In that sense they were humanists, although not
concerned with the classical researches of the humanist movement
in Florence. What they admired in Meung was his free-ranging
thought and bold attack on standard formulas. Among certain
learned and enlightened men, Jean de Montreuil asserted,
appreciation of the Roman de la Rose was such that they would

rather do without their shirts than this book. “The more I study the
gravity of the mysteries and the mystery of the gravity of this
profound and famous work, the more I am astonished at your
disapproval.”
While fervent, this was not very specic. Pierre Col was more
courageous, defending the sensuality that so oended Gerson. He
asserted that the Song of Solomon celebrated love for the daughter
of Pharaoh, not for the Church; that the female vulva represented by
the Rose was held to be sacred, according to the Gospel of St. Luke;
and that Gerson himself would one day fall in love, as had happened
to other theologians.
The debate expanded. Christine replied with Le Dit de la Rose and
Gerson with a magisterial essay, Tractatus Contra Romantium de Rosa
in which allegorical gures carry their complaints against Jean de
Meung before the “sacred court of Christianity” and he is
appropriately condemned. Although Gerson had the last word in the
controversy, he could not destroy the attraction of the book. It
continued to be widely read into the 16th century, surviving even a
pious attempt to “moralize” its images, in which the Rose was
transformed into an allegory for Jesus.
While Gerson remained within the establishment, the search for
faith was drawing others outside in movements away from
institutional religion. People were seeking in lay communion a
substitute for rituals grown routine and corrupt. Faith was all the
more needed when the way seemed lost in a dark wood of alarms
and confusions.
The damage done by the schism had deepened. Both the popes
were absorbed in extravagant display for the sake of prestige and
the search for more and more money to support it. Pope Boniface in
Rome took cuts from usury and sold beneces to the point of
scandal, sometimes re-selling the same oce to a higher bidder and
dating the second appointment previous to the rst. He sold the
right to hold as many as ten or twelve beneces at a time. Clement
VII extracted “voluntary” loans and subsidies and piled up

ecclesiastical taxes until his bishops in 1392 refused to pay, and
pinned their protest to the doors of the papal palace in Avignon. As
a dependent of France, he made over tithes on the French clergy to
the crown, and in the many disputes arising from this, he took the
crown’s part against the clergy. No measures lled his need; he had
to borrow from usurers and pawn the sacred treasures. At his death,
it was said, the papal tiara itself was on pawn.
Within the Empire the eect of the schism was not greatly
divisive because conditions were already so chaotic that they could
not have been made much worse. Charles IV had taken the
precaution before he died of having his eldest son, Wenceslas,
crowned King of Bohemia and nominated Emperor ahead of time,
but concord and unity did not come with the title. This was not
surprising since Charles had apportioned rule of the imperial
territories among Wenceslas’ two brothers, an uncle and a cousin.
Their interests were often at odds, the rival houses of Wittelsbach
and Hapsburg were hostile, the twenty-odd principalities were
insubordinate, the towns, ghting to maintain their privileges,
formed leagues against the nobles. Revenues adequate for the
exercise of central government could not be collected out of
conditions of anarchy, and the authority of the Emperor was too
supercial to control the situation.
Wenceslas IV was eighteen when he acceded to the throne in
1378 shortly after accompanying his father on the memorable visit
to Paris. Although trained in government by his father, well
educated and literate in Latin, French, German, and Czech, he
lacked the character to dominate his circumstances. Despite his
initial eorts to work out a balance of forces, the incessant warring
of groups and classes, of towns versus princes, lesser nobles against
the greater, Germans against Czechs, leagues against leagues,
created a network of dissension that deed sovereignty—and
destroyed the sovereign.
A tragic, ruined gure, Wenceslas emerges from the chronicles a
kind of Caliban, half clownish, half vicious, a composite of half-
truths and legends reecting the animosities of his various sets of
enemies. Because his reign was the source of the Hussite revolt

against the Church and of the rising Czech nationalism hostile to the
Germans, Wenceslas suered posthumously from both clerical and
German chroniclers. The unfair advantage of the written word
triumphs in the end. But even if exaggerated, the stories about
Wenceslas are too much of a kind not to represent some body of
truth.
Said by his partisans to be good-looking and well-mannered, he
appears more generally as a “wild boar” who went on rampages at
night with bad companions, burst into burghers’ houses to rape their
wives, shut up his own wife in a whorehouse, roasted a cook who
served him a burned meal. According to these versions, he was sired
by a cobbler, was born ugly and deformed (causing the death of his
mother in giving him birth), soiled the baptismal water at his
christening, and stained the altar by sweating profusely at his
coronation at the age of two—all omens, although probably ex post
facto, of an unholy reign. He was happy only when hunting,
spending months at a time in the woods and at hunting lodges to
the neglect of government, preferring the company of grooms and
hunting companions whom he ennobled, to the anger of the barons.
His early eorts to uphold justice and achieve order left him
frustrated, he only made enemies by favoring one faction over
another, his errors of judgment compounded a sense of inadequacy,
he became incapable of pursuing a policy with any consistency, ed
from his problems, and found refuge from incapacity in hunting and
heavy drinking.
While it was common in Germany for a man in any rank of
society to drink himself under the table, Wenceslas became a
conrmed alcoholic. He grew increasingly irritable and black-
tempered and indolent as a sovereign, stayed in Prague to the
neglect of the rest of the Empire, and succumbed to ts of savagery
in which he was thought sometimes to have “lost command of his
reason.” As if reecting his master, one of the hounds that followed
him everywhere was said to have attacked and killed his rst wife,
Joanna of Bavaria—although according to other sources she died of
the plague and left a sorrowing husband too distressed—or possibly
too drunk—to attend the funeral. Evidently not as repellent as he

was later made out to be, he married a second Bavarian princess,
reputedly very beautiful, who was said to have held him in great
aection. Not so the Church, whose priests he pilloried, together
with their concubines. His reign saw the notorious pogrom of 1389
when a priest leading a procession through the Jewish quarter of
Prague on Easter Sunday was stoned by a Jewish child, causing the
townspeople to turn out for the slaughter of 3,000 of the Jewish
community. When the survivors sought justice from the King,
Wenceslas declared that the Jews deserved their punishment, and
ned the survivors, not the perpetrators.
His most famous conict came with the Church and ended in the
canonizing of his victim. Its cause lay in the usual struggle of
temporal versus ecclesiastical authority. Enmity reached a peak in
1393 when the Archbishop of Prague ordered his Vicar-General,
John of Pomuk, to conrm the election of an abbot chosen by the
monks over the candidate preferred by the King. Wenceslas in a fury
threw the Archbishop, the Vicar-General, and two other prelates
into prison; then, after releasing the Archbishop, tortured the others
to extract a confession of the hierarchy’s hostile designs. Maddened
by their silence, the King himself reportedly seized a torch to apply
to the victims’ feet. Frightened by what he had done, he then
oered to spare their lives in return for their promise on oath not to
tell of their torture. When John of Pomuk proved too broken and
suering to sign the oath, Wenceslas, in a compulsion to destroy the
evidence, had him bound hand and foot and thrown from a bridge
into the Moldau to drown. John of Pomuk was subsequently
canonized as a martyr and made the patron saint of all bridges.
The King’s troubles mounted through the 1390s. He was drunk a
great part of the time but not so incapacitated as to fail to
aggrandize his Bohemian possessions at the expense of the great
nobles. In consequence, he succeeded in uniting them in antagonism
for long enough to enable them nally to depose him as Emperor in
1400, although he remained King of Bohemia.
Wenceslas’ diculties were not merely personal or
temperamental. They were an epitome of his century. He too was
lost in the dark wood of his time. Like Jean II of France, he was

born to a task of government too heavy for him in an age when too
much was going wrong. Like government, the Church in his country
was failing in its task and giving rise to the strongest movement for
reform in Europe. Taking its doctrine from Wyclif and named for
Jan Hus, who was to be burned as a heretic in 1415, the Hussite
rising opened the way to the Reformation a hundred years later. It
also nished o Wenceslas by inducing an apoplectic t of which he
died in 1419.
In France the feverish atmosphere showed itself in 1389 when an
impassioned controversy over the immaculate conception of the
Virgin caused Dominican monks to be accused, like the Jews in the
plague, of poisoning the rivers if not the wells. It happened that a
Dominican, Jean de Montson, had propagated the view that the
Virgin was conceived in original sin. He was condemned by the
University of Paris, which upheld the opposite, Franciscan, view of
her immaculate conception. When Montson appealed to Pope
Clement, d’Ailly and Gerson went to Avignon to demand ocial
approval of their opinion. Clement was in a dilemma. Montson’s
view was that of previous orthodoxy approved by Thomas Aquinas.
If Clement denounced it, his own orthodoxy would be challenged by
his rival in Rome. If he upheld it, he would be contradicting the
University and arousing popular wrath in France. In the heat of this
situation, angry threats pursued the Dominicans. Afraid for his life,
Montson went over to Rome, leaving Clement free to declare for
Immaculate Conception.
While devotion to the Virgin could still arouse such feeling,
disbelief and irreverence were common at the end of the century, if
the complaints of clerics and preachers reect the true case.
Scolding the laity was the cleric’s normal occupation, but now the
volume was rising. Many folk “believe in naught higher than the
roof of their house,” lamented the future saint Bernardino of Siena.
His fellow monk Walsingham reported that certain barons of
England believe “that there is no God, and deny the sacrament of
the altar and resurrection after death, and consider that as is the
death of a beast of burden, so is the end of man himself.” Alongside
evidence of failing faith may be put the unfailing succession of wills

and bequests to shrines, chapels, convents, hermits, and sums for
prayers and for pilgrimages by proxy. Few who professed disbelief
during life took chances when they neared the end.
The too frequent use of excommunication for failure to take
communion or keep feast days, so deplored by Gerson and other
reformers, was a measure of the falling o of religious observance.
Churches were empty and mass meagerly attended, wrote Nicolas de
Clamanges in his great tract De Ruina et Reparatione Ecclesiae (The
Ruin and Reform of the Church). The young, according to him,
rarely went to church except on feast days and then only to see the
painted faces and décolleté gowns of the ladies and the spectacle of
their headdresses, “immense towers with horns hung with pearls.”
People kept vigils in church not with prayer but with lascivious
songs and dances, while the priests shot dice as they watched.
Gerson deplored the same laxity: men left church in the midst of
services to have a drink and “when they hear the bell announcing
consecration, they rush back into the church like bulls.” Card-
playing, swearing, and blasphemy, he wrote, occurred during the
most sacred festivals, and obscene pictures were hawked in church,
corrupting the young. Pilgrimages were the occasion for
debauchery, adultery, and profane pleasures.
Irreverence in many cases was the by-product of a religion so
much a part of daily life that it was treated with over-familiarity,
but the chorus of reproof at the end of the century indicated a
growing element of disgust. “Men slept in indierence and closed
their eyes to the scandal,” mourned the Monk of St. Denis. “It was a
waste of time to talk of ways to reform the Church.”
Indierence, however, like a vacuum in nature, is not a natural
condition of human aairs. A new devotional movement arose at
this time in the small trading towns of northern Holland, between
desolate marshland and moor near the mouth of the Rhine—as if
only in a remote corner of strife-torn Europe could fresh piety nd a
place to sprout. Because the members lived communally, they came
to be known by their neighbors as the Brethren of the Common Life,
although they referred to themselves simply as “the devout.” Their
purpose was to nd direct union with God, and through preaching

and good works create a devout lay society. They were not
extremists like the earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit but simply, as
they said, “religious men trying to live in the world”—meaning the
lay world as distinct from the cloistered.
Gerard Groote, founder of the movement, was the son of a
prosperous cloth merchant of Deventer in Holland. Born in the same
year as Coucy, he spent a dissolute youth while studying law and
theology at the University of Paris, where he dabbled in magic and
medicine and made love to women “in every green woods and upon
every mountain.” Finding the scholars’ disputations “useless and full
of discord,” he left the University to join the secular clergy, and
after a career as a worldly pastor in Utrecht and Cologne,
experienced a conversion. Giving away his property in Deventer to
charity, he went forth to preach a gospel of dedication to God
springing from an “inner kernel of devotion,” rather than from
baptism and the sacraments.
His zeal, gift of rhetoric, and an impressive personality attracted
listeners in crowds that often overowed the churches. People came
to listen from miles away. Wearing an old gray cloak and patched
garments, and trundling with him a barrel of books from which to
confute critics after a sermon, Groote urged love of neighbors as
well as of God, elimination of vice, and obedience to Christ’s
commandments. Lamenting the corruption and predicting the
impending collapse of the Church, he preached to the clergy in Latin
and to the laity in the vernacular. A disciple took down his words
and another went ahead to post announcement of a coming sermon
on the church doors of the next town. Enthusiasts met in groups to
adopt his principles and gradually joined to practice them, living
together in houses segregated by sex.
Association was voluntary, without the binding vow essential in
the regular Orders, committing members to life apart from the
world. Under the rules of Groote’s Devotia Moderna, members were
to live in poverty and chastity but, instead of begging like the friars,
were to earn their living by teaching children and by two
occupations not controlled by the guilds, copying manuscripts and
cooking. Work, Groote believed, “was wonderfully necessary to

mankind in restoring the mind to purity,” although not so
commerce: “Labor is holy, but business is dangerous.” By the time
he died of an illness in 1384, his followers’ houses in Holland and
the Rhineland numbered well over a hundred, with those for women
being three times as many as those for men.
The communities’ emphasis on individual devotion and their very
existence without a vow or an ocial rule were in themselves a
criticism of the authorized Orders. Voluntary self-directed religion
was more dangerous to the Church than any number of indels.
Before he died, Groote was prohibited from preaching by the Bishop
of Utrecht. When other churchmen afterward attempted to suppress
the movement, his followers made vigorous and successful defense
of their principles. At the Council of Constance in 1415, Gerson,
though he disliked their doctrines, defended them against charges of
heresy. Their communities survived because a climate of sympathy
existed in their favor, and not only among the laity. Two years after
Groote’s death, the Brethren established their rst formal monastery
in association with the Augustinian Order, though still without
vows. Although the movement remained small and limited, it was
soon to produce in The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, the
most widely read religious book in Catholicism after the Bible.
In 1380, in the small town of Kempen, south of Deventer, a
peasant’s son was born to an evidently literate mother who kept a
dame’s school for the younger children of the town. At twelve,
Thomas of Kempen—or a Kempis, as he came to be called—entered
a school of the Common Life at Deventer, lived and studied with its
disciples, and then joined an associated Augustinian monastery,
where he remained for the rest of his 91 years. Loving books and
quiet corners, he compiled the sayings and sermons of Groote and
his disciples into a prolonged rhapsody on the theme that the world
is delusion and the Kingdom of God is within; that the inner
spiritual life is preparation for life everlasting. What he was saying
over and over, through endless variations and admonitions, was that
the life of the senses is without value, that the riches, pleasures, and
powers of the world—the things most men want and rarely obtain—
are no good to them anyway, but are only an obstacle on the way to

eternal life; that the way to salvation lies in the abnegation of
earthly desires and in the continual struggle against sin in order to
make room for love of God; that man is born “with an inclination to
evil,” which he must conquer to be saved; that good lies in doing,
not knowing—“I would rather feel compunction than know how to
dene it”; that only the humble in spirit are at peace—“it is much
safer to be in subjection than in authority”; that to desire anything
is to be “straightway disquieted”; that man is but a pilgrim in life,
the world is an exile, home is with God.
Nothing of this was new or remarkable. The Imitation of Christ was
what it said it was, an imitation of Christ’s message, a consolation
for the humble who are mankind’s majority, a reassurance of the
promise that their reward is to come hereafter. For a long time after
Thomas’ book appeared, so little was known about its author that
Jean Gerson was supposed by some to be the Bacon behind this
obscure northern Shakespeare.
In 1391 Gerson’s plea against the Way of Force held the attention
of the court from prime to vespers. Remembering how prison had
closed over his predecessors, he pursued his argument at some risk,
but as a native of Burgundy he had acquired the Duke as a patron,
which may have made the sermon possible. He urged the crown to
abandon the Voie de Fait with its “doubtful battle and spilling of
blood,” recommending rather a resort to augmented prayer and
penitential processions. In a discreet rebuke, he deplored the
gagging of the University on the subject of a Church Council, “for I
have no doubt that if you had been better informed on what your
very humble and devout daughter, the University of Paris, wished to
say to you on this matter, you would very willingly have heard it,
and great good would have come of it.”
Boldly he suggested that the welfare of the papacy was
subordinate to that of the Christian community as a whole, and that
it would be “intolerable” if the Holy See, instituted for the good of
the Church, became the instrument of its grave damage. He called
on the memory of St. Louis, Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver, and

the Maccabees to inspire Charles VI to remove the stain of the
schism, a task Gerson did not hesitate to declare more important
than a crusade against Islam. “What is greater than the union of
Christendom? Who can better achieve that union than the most
Christian King?”
Interference more material than Gerson’s blocked the Voie de Fait
for the time being. France could not go to war in Italy without the
alliance or, at very least, the benevolent neutrality of Florence and
Milan, a prospect distinctly impeded by the fact of their being at
war with each other. Each had rival advocates in France. Milan was
represented by Valentina Visconti, wife of Louis d’Orléans. Louis
dreamed of acquiring the promised Kingdom of Adria, still waiting
to be carved out of the Papal States in return for French support.
The dream depended on access to the wealth of Milan and on the
collaboration of Louis’ father-in-law in the Voie de Fait. Gian
Galeazzo’s interests were double-edged. He favored a Kingdom of
Adria in friendly—that is, in French—hands, while at the same time
he was wary of allowing France to become a power in Italy. He
wanted a French alliance against Florence but he did not want to
opt openly for Clement or commit himself to the Voie de Fait. While
steering through these shoals, he had to frustrate the Florentine
league against him, and confound the schemes of Bernabò’s various
sons and relations who were bent on his destruction.
News was spreading in Naples that the King of France and the
Anti-Pope Clement were coming to Rome with a great army to
reunite the Church. Clement himself was so sure of the program that
he had ordered portable altars, riding saddles, pack saddles,
blankets, and all equipment for a major move. Pope Boniface in
great alarm begged the English to divert the French. This was
accomplished not by a threat of war but by an oer of peace.
English ambassadors came to France in February 1391 bringing an
oer to negotiate a denitive treaty. Coucy and Rivière were
delegated to confer with the English, to dine them and “keep them
company.” As evidence of serious purpose, the ambassadors said
that King Richard’s uncles, Lancaster and the bellicose Gloucester,
would represent England at the parley. France could not refuse the

momentous opportunity even if it meant postponing the Voie de Fait
—which, of course, was the English purpose. The parley was set for
the end of June and the march on Rome held in abeyance.
When June came, the English, having accomplished their original
purpose, hung back from the edge of peace. At their request, the
parley was postponed for another nine months until the following
March. The truth was that England’s counsels were sharply divided.
King Richard and his two elder uncles, Lancaster and York, favored
peace, while the relentless Thomas of Gloucester adamantly opposed
it. In the generation since his father had fought France with no
particular animus, the sense of underlying chivalric comradeship
had shriveled. Gloucester, the youngest son, was xed in his
conviction that the French were perdious and tricky and, by shifty
legalities and ambiguous language, had cozened the English out of
the gains conrmed in the Treaty of Brétigny. He refused to make
peace until theyrendered back “all such cities, towns, lands, and
seigneuries” which they had falsely taken, not to mention 1,400,000
francs still owing on King Jean’s ransom.
The real reason for his attitude lay deeper. Essentially, Gloucester
and the barons of his party were opposed to peace because they felt
war to be their occupation. Behind them were the poorer knights
and squires and archers of England, who, unconcerned with rights
or wrongs, were “inclined to war such as had been their livelihood.”
At this moment, England’s old ally, the Duke of Brittany, addicted
as ever to feuding, suddenly re-opened his quarrel with France.
Discarding a vassal’s loyalty, he became more and more contentious
and presumptuous, minting money bearing his own image, and
assuming other rights of independent sovereignty. The French were
anxious to bring him to submission before the date of the parley
with the English, knowing that otherwise their uncovered ank
would put them at a disadvantage. Coucy, one of the few persons
acceptable to the irascible Duke, arranged for him to meet with the
King and Council at Tours. Montfort came up the Loire attended by
a suite of 1,500 knights and squires, in a convoy of ve ships armed
with cannon. For three months, from October to December 1391,
the eort dragged on. Half slippery, half intransigent, Montfort

could not be brought to terms. As a last resort, the King’s daughter
Jeanne, barely a year old, was oered in marriage to Montfort’s son
as the only means of attaching Brittany. The same solution had
notably failed in the recent past to attach Charles of Navarre. With
no great grace, after concluding the arrangement, Montfort went
home “conserving all his hate.”
While at Tours, Coucy was caught up in an aair that was to have
bitter if posthumous irony for himself. It happened that the only son
and heir of Count Guy de Blois died, leaving an enormous estate
devoid of dynastic heirs. The limitless acquisitiveness of Louis
d’Orléans focused at once on the property, which lay between his
own domains of Touraine and Orléans. He and the King and Coucy
rode over together from nearby Tours to visit the bereaved, and also
bankrupt, father. Count Guy was the former fellow hostage in
England who, to buy his liberty, had transferred his property of
Soissons through King Edward to Coucy. Wild spending had since
dissipated his great wealth; overeating and drinking had left him
and his wife “overgrown with fatness” so that the Count could no
longer mount his horse and had to be carried to the hunt in a litter.
Given to ts of rage, he had once, in what appears to have been a
14th century habit, killed a knight with his dagger. Now he was old,
sick, and childless, surrounded by swarms of quarreling would-be
heirs.
Coucy had much inuence with Count Guy, besides holding a lien
on his property deriving from money still owed on the Soissons
transaction. As “un grand traitteur” (an accomplished negotiator), he
was chosen by both parties to evaluate the estate and arrange its
sale to Louis d’Orléans. Sale of dynastic property for cash was
considered something of a disgrace. If Coucy was reluctant to act in
such a matter—and there is no evidence that he was—he was
handsomely, almost too handsomely, compensated by Louis for his
services. When he succeeded in reducing Blois’ asking price of
200,000 francs for his lands in Hainault by 50,000, or 25 percent,
Louis paid him back the dierence. At the same time, Louis
acquitted Coucy of the debt of 10,000 orins loaned to him for the
Tunisian campaign, “in consideration to our said cousin of the many

and great services he has rendered to us.” For the entire Blois estate
Louis paid 400,000 francs from his wife’s dowry, becoming thereby
a territorial proprietor on a level with his uncles.
Froissart, who had been in the service of Guy de Blois before the
days of the empty purse, delivered himself of the stern and rather
surprising judgment that “The Sire de Coucy was greatly to blame in
this matter.” Perhaps he meant that Coucy should not have made
money out of a transaction which Froissart considered ignoble. The
worshiper of a caste often upholds higher ideals for it than its
members. In the ultimate irony, Coucy’s own domain after his death
was to follow Blois’ into Orléans’ hands.
Rarely if ever at home, Coucy resumed his duties as Lieutenant-
General in Auvergne and Guienne in January 1392, and came north
again in March to accompany the King to the great parley at
Amiens. In happy omen just before the parley, a son was born to
Charles and Isabeau, their fth child, of whom the two eldest were
already dead. Paris celebrated in great emotion as bells pealed and
bonres amed in the public squares. People lled the churches to
thank God for a Dauphin and afterward sang and danced in the
streets, where tables loaded with wine and food were set out for
them by noble ladies and wealthy bourgeois. The object of their joy
was to die at the age of nine, as were four more sons before one of
the puny progeny survived to become the feckless Dauphin
eventually crowned as Charles VII by Joan of Arc.
Extraordinary measures were taken to ensure that no quarrels
arose between French and English retinues to disrupt the parley.
The Council ordered French subjects on pain of death to abstain
from all insults and provocative remarks or challenges to, or even
talk of, combat. No one was to go out at night without a torch; any
page or varlet who provoked a quarrel in a tavern was to earn the
death penalty. Four companies of 1,000 guards each were to keep
watch day and night to prevent assemblies with potential for
trouble. If the re bell rang, they were not to move from their posts
but leave it to the regular re companies to answer the alarm. The
English were to be received with “greatest honors,” treated with
utmost courtesy, and entertained free of cost. Innkeepers were not

to demand money from them but submit their accounts to the royal
exchequer for payment.
These precautions expressed the French desire less for peace per
se than for a settlement that would open the way to the Voie de Fait
and to crusade. On the English side, the Dukes of Lancaster and
York showed a similar sentiment, but the absence of Gloucester left
an ominous hole. In recognition of Coucy’s inuence, the English
Dukes had brought his daughter Philippa with them, no doubt
hoping thereby to win his support for their terms. Philippa had
expressed an ardent desire to see the father she barely knew, and
Coucy had much joy in the meeting. His daughter “travelled in good
state, but like a widow who had enjoyed little pleasure in her
marriage.”
In the presence of Charles seated on his throne, the parley opened
at Eastertime in the utmost ceremony and grandeur, as if to support
the great burden of its outcome. Lancaster knelt three times on his
approach to the throne in the ritual of homage and was welcomed
by the King with aectionate words, and by Burgundy and Berry
with the kiss of peace. The splendor of the Duke of Burgundy was
never more marvelous. He wore black velvet embroidered on the
left sleeve with a branch of 22 roses composed of sapphires and
rubies surrounded with pearls. On another day he wore a crimson
velvet robe embroidered on each side with a bear in silver whose
collar, muzzle, and leash sparkled with jewels. The great French
lords, including Coucy, each gave a banquet for the English on
successive nights at which knightly courtesies were exchanged and
old acquaintances renewed.
Not all the precautions, free meals, and luxurious surroundings
were enough to gain a peace. The parley lasted two weeks, but both
parties knew it was useless. The English demand for more than a
million francs in arrears on Jean’s ransom was met by the French
claim for an indemnity of three million for war damages on their
soil. They went so far as to scale down their demand for the return
of Calais to a demand that the city and walls be razed to make the
place unusable. The English refused, considering that as long as they
held Calais, “they wore the key to France on their belt.” The

sovereignty of Aquitaine was disputed as ever. Even when the
French nally oered to pay the arrears on Jean’s ransom and
guarantee peaceable possession if not sovereignty of Aquitaine, in
return for the razing of Calais, the English held back. They were not
sure they wanted peace. When Charles urged the cause of the
crusade, they said, as so often before, that they had no powers to
conclude denitive terms, but would report back to their King. One
more of the countless peace parleys came to nothing. Once more the
truce was extended for yet another year. How hard it was to end a
war.
Whether from disappointment or natural causes, King Charles fell
ill in the midst of the parley, suering from high fever and
transports of delirium. Removed from Amiens to the quiet
surroundings of the episcopal palace at Beauvais, where he was
carefully nursed, he soon recovered, and by June had resumed
hunting and his other pleasures. No ill omens were attached to the
sudden strange illness, although they might well have been.
32. Papal palace at Avignon as it would have appeared in the 14th
century. Engraving by Israel Sylvestre, c. 1650.(illustration credit 23.1)

14TH CENTURY COINS(illustration credit 23.2)

A Sienese army of 1363 depicted in the area where Coucy’s
campaign took place twenty years later. Fresco by Lippo Vanni, 1373, in
the Sala del Mappamondo, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.(illustration credit
23.3)

THE SWISS CAMPAIGN
35. The Gügler enter Switzerland under the ags of Coucy and England.
(illustration credit 23.4)

The ght at Fraubrunnen showing the ag of Bern (the Bear). Both
from the Berner Chronik, c. 1400.(illustration credit 23.5)

Sir John Hawkwood.
Fresco by Paolo Uccello in the Cathedral of Florence.(illustration credit
23.6)

Pierre de Luxemburg, with a cardinal’s hat on the altar drapery.
Portrait, c. 1400.(illustration credit 23.7)

Burning of the Jews. From Gilles li Muisis, Antiquitates Flandriae,
14th century.(illustration credit 23.8)

A Jew wearing the circular badge. Detail from a 14th century fresco
of St. Helena’s discovery of the True Cross, in the Cathedral of
Tarragona.(illustration credit 23.9)

Christine de Pisan composing her works. From the manuscript of her
Oeuvres, vol. Poésies, c. 1405.(illustration credit 23.10)

Jean de Berry, statue in the Cathedral of Bourges.(illustration
credit 23.11)

Philip of Burgundy, statue by Claus Sluter in the Champmol, Dijon.
(illustration credit 23.12)

Charles V receiving the translation of Aristotle’s Ethics from Nicolas
Oresme. From Les éthiques d’Aristote, 1372 version.(illustration
credit 23.13)

Pope Urban VI. From a relief on the back of his sarcophagus in the
Vatican Grotto, Rome, dated 1389.(illustration credit 23.14)

Clement VII. Fragment of egy at Avignon.(illustration credit
23.15)

The siege of Mahdia. From Froissart’s Chronicles, Louis de Bruges
copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 23.16)

Louis d’Orléans. Portrait, c. 1420.(illustration credit 23.17)

The Visconti device: a viper swallowing a man,(illustration credit
23.18)

Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Pen drawing by Antonio Pisanello (1397–
1455).(illustration credit 23.19)

Froissart oering his Chronicles to Charles VI. From Froissart’s
Chronicles, c. 1450.(illustration credit 23.20)

Gerson preaching at the Church of St. Bernard in Paris. From
Sermons sur la Passion, illustrated by Baudoin de Lannoy, c. 1480.
(illustration credit 23.21)

Burean de la Rivière, statues from La Grange buttress, Cathedral of
Amiens.(illustration credit 23.22)

Cardinal Jean de La Grange, statues from La Grange buttress,
Cathedral of Amiens.(illustration credit 23.23)

Egy of Guillaume de Harsigny at Laon.(illustration credit 23.24)

DANSE MACABRE
Fresco in the Abbey of Chaise-Dien at Riom, 15th century.(illustration
credit 23.25)

Lamentation of the Virgin with St. John. From the Rohan Hours, c.
1420.(illustration credit 23.26)

Massacre of the prisoners at Nicopolis. From Froissart’s Chronicles,
Louis de Bruges copy, c. 1460.(illustration credit 23.27)

Posthumous portrait of Coucy commissioned by the Celestin
monastery of Villeneuve-les-Soissons two hundred years after his death.
(illustration credit 23.28)

Ruins of the donjon of Concy, after the German dynamiting of
1917.(illustration credit 23.29)

Aerial view of Coucy-le-Château today.(illustration credit 23.30)

Chapter 24

H
Danse Macabre
istory never more cruelly demonstrated the vulnerability of
a nation to the person of its chief of state than in the
aiction of France beginning in 1392.
The circumstances that brought on the crisis arose from a
struggle for power centering on the gure of Clisson, the Constable.
As the main prop of the ministerial party, he was the object of the
uncles’ political enmity as well as of the Duke of Brittany’s undying
hatred. For as long as he retained the controlling military post with
access to its immense nancial advantages, and remained in
partnership with the Marmosets and the King’s brother, the uncles
saw themselves kept at a distance from power. The Duke of Brittany
feared him as a rival in Breton aairs and hated him the more
ercely because he had failed to kill him when he had had the
chance. In their common desire to destroy Clisson, the interests of
Brittany and the King’s uncles met, and they maintained clandestine
contact with each other.
Serving as a link between them was a Burgundian protégé, related
to both the Duchess of Burgundy and the Duke of Brittany, the same
sinister Pierre de Craon who had embezzled the Duc d’Anjou’s funds
in the Naples campaign. Since then he had outed a court order to
reimburse Anjou’s widow, and had assassinated a knight of Laon but
used his inuence to secure a pardon. These derelictions had not
prevented his nding favor in the royal circle of pleasure seekers.
He evidently possessed the charm of wickedness. However, he
angered Louis d’Orléans by informing his wife—apparently from an
irresistible impulse to mischief—of an extra-marital passion which
Louis had conded to him. Louis had even taken Craon to visit the
beautiful, if too virtuous, lady who had resisted an oer of 1,000
gold crowns for her favors. On discovering Craon’s betrayal, Louis in

a rage took the tale to the King, who compliantly banished the
troublemaker. Craon claimed he was removed because he had tried
to make Louis give up engaging in occult practices and consorting
with sorcerers.
Burning with resentment, he took refuge with the Duke of
Brittany, who was his cousin. In Craon the Duke found the agent for
another attempt to ruin Clisson. Because Clisson was married to a
niece of the Duchess d’Anjou, he automatically shared that family’s
mortal enmity for Craon. On this basis Craon already suspected, and
the Duke of Brittany easily persuaded him, that Clisson’s hand was
behind his banishment—which may have been true. Clisson is said
to have discovered secret correspondence between Craon and the
Dukes. In any event, Craon now “breathed only for vengeance.”
On the night of June 13, 1392, having returned secretly to Paris,
Craon waited in ambush at a street crossing where Clisson would
pass on the way to his hôtel. With Craon in the darkness was a party
of forty armored followers, enough to ensure overwhelming odds
against an opponent in civilian circumstances. When a man really
intended the death of a fellow noble, chivalry’s codes were
surprisingly non-inhibiting. Rather than challenge his enemy to
open combat, Craon preferred to strike in the dark. Judging by his
record, he was a man without moral sense, but he was not alone.
Montfort too had violated honor, loyalty, and every other principle
of chivalry when he had kidnapped Clisson. Clisson himself was no
Roland. In the lifetime of these men, under the disruptive eects of
plague, brigandage, and schism, normal codes of conduct
disintegrated.
Escorted by eight attendants with torches but unarmed for
combat, Clisson was returning on horseback from a party given by
the King at St. Pol. He was discussing with his squires a dinner he
was to give next day for Coucy, Orléans, and Vienne when suddenly
the torchlight fell upon a dark mass of mounted men and on the
faint gleam of helmet and cuirass. The assailants charged,
extinguishing Clisson’s torches and crying, “A mort! A mort!” Craon’s
men did not know whom they were attacking because the identity
of the victim had been kept secret. They were appalled to hear their

chief shout in his excitement, as with brandished sword he urged
them forward, “Clisson, you must die!”
Clisson cried out to his unknown assailant, “Who are you?”
“I am Pierre de Craon, your enemy!” replied the leader openly, for
he anticipated a corpse and an overturn of government in
consequence. His men, stunned to discover themselves engaged in
murdering the Constable of France, were hesitant in pressing the
attack, “for treason is never bold.” Armed only with a dagger,
Clisson desperately defended himself until, struck by many blows,
he was unhorsed. He fell into the doorway of a baker’s shop, forcing
open the door by the weight of his fall, just as the baker, hearing the
racket, appeared in time to pull him into the house. Believing they
had killed him, Craon and his party hastened away. The survivors
among Clisson’s squires found him in the shop, slashed by sword
cuts, bathed in blood, and apparently lifeless. By the time the King,
aroused from bed and informed of the awful news, reached the
baker’s shop, Clisson had recovered consciousness.
“How goes it with you, Constable?” pleaded Charles, stricken at
the sight.
“Feebly, Sire.”
“Who has done this to you?” When Clisson named his assassin,
Charles swore that “no deed shall ever be so expiated as this, nor so
heavily punished.” He called for surgeons, who, on examining the
Constable’s hardened body, survivor of a hundred combats,
promised his recovery. Carried to his residence, Clisson was “much
cheered” by a visit from Coucy, who as his brother-in-arms was the
rst to be informed after the King.
Orders for the capture of Craon failed because the gates of Paris,
still stripped of their bars since the insurrection, could not be closed.
Learning that, unbelievably, Clisson lived, Craon escaped from the
city, galloped as far as Chartres and thence to Brittany. “It is
diabolic,” he told the Duke in explaining his failure. “I believe all
the devils of Hell, to whom the Constable belongs, guarded and
delivered him out of my hands, for he suered more than sixty
blows by swords or knives and I truly believed him dead.”

King Charles, feeling himself attacked in the person of the state’s
chief defender, pursued the assassin with insatiable fury. Two of
Craon’s squires and a page were beheaded on capture, as was the
steward of his Paris residence for failing to report his return to the
capital. A canon of Chartres who had given him shelter was
deprived of his beneces and condemned to perpetual abstinence in
prison on bread and water. Craon’s properties and revenues were
conscated to the benet of the Royal Treasury; his residences and
castles were ordered razed. The King’s excited state of mind
communicated itself, as royal rage will, to his deputies. Admiral de
Vienne, charged with making an inventory of Craon’s fortune,
reportedly evicted his wife and daughter without possessions or
money, in nothing but the clothes they wore—after raping the
daughter, according to one report—and helped himself to the rich
furnishings and valuables of their residence. Perhaps he felt that
Craon’s treason justied this indecency, though his conduct was
widely condemned by fellow nobles. Strange excesses owed from
the attempted murder of the Constable, as if Craon’s act had
released a contagion of evil.
Events moved from murder to war when the Duke of Brittany, on
being ordered to surrender the culprit, denied all knowledge of him
and refused to concern himself in any way. Thus deed, the King
called for war on the Duke. Barely recovered from his illness at
Amiens, Charles appeared often distraught and disconnected in
speech. His physicians advised against a campaign, but, encouraged
by his brother, he insisted. Burgundy and Berry, who depended on
the Duke of Brittany as their ally in the political struggle, bent every
endeavor to prevent it. The heat of family partisanship was added to
the conict by the Duchess of Burgundy, who was Montfort’s niece
and therefore took his side and hated Clisson with venomous
intensity. Burgundian inuence was certainly behind the asylum
given to Craon. Berry, for his part, was said to have had prior
knowledge of Craon’s assault.
When it was learned that Clisson’s will, dictated after the attack,
left a fortune of 1,700,000 francs, not counting lands, the uncles’
jealous rage at nding themselves outdone in the rewards of avarice

knew no bounds. Such a fortune—greater than the King’s, they let it
be known—could have come from no honest source. The public was
ready enough to believe it, for Rivière and Mercier, too, had
amassed fortunes from government service and were generally
disliked as both arrogant and venal. All these strifes and rancors
festered behind the unstable King as he clamored for war.
The Council approved the campaign; the uncles, left out of the
decision but bound to join the King, were augmented in their hatred
of the ministers. “They dreamed of nothing but how to destroy
them.” The King, accompanied by Bourbon and Coucy, left Paris on
July 1, moving westward by slow stages as knights and their
retinues came up to join the march. Charles’s ill health required
protracted stops, and further delay was caused by waiting for the
uncles. Hoping to forestall the war, they dallied and procrastinated,
putting Charles in a frenzy of impatience. Scarcely eating or
drinking, he was in Council every day, harping on the insult to him
through his Constable, upset at any contradictions, refusing
absolutely to be swerved from punishing the Duke of Brittany.
Discord, arriving with Burgundy and Berry, spread to the army,
where knights disputed the rights and wrongs of the enterprise. In
reply to a second demand for Craon’s surrender, Montfort again
denied knowing anything about him. Charles, although declared
“feverish and unt to ride” by his physicians, would wait no longer.
In the heat of mid-August the march began from Le Mans on the
borders of Brittany. On a sandy road under blazing sun, the King,
wearing a black velvet jacket and a hat of scarlet velvet ornamented
with pearls, rode apart from the others to avoid the dust. Two pages
rode behind, one carrying his helmet, the other his lance. Ahead
rode the two uncles in one group, and Louis d’Orléans with Coucy
and Bourbon in another. As the party passed through the forest of
Mans, a rough barefoot man in a ragged smock suddenly stepped
from behind a tree and seized the King’s bridle, crying in a voice of
doom, “Ride no further, noble King! Turn back! You are betrayed!”
Charles shrank in alarm. Escorts beat the man’s hand from the bridle
but because he appeared no more than a poor madman did not

arrest him, not even when he followed the company for half an hour
crying betrayal in the King’s ears.
Emerging from the forest, the riders came out on an open plain at
high noon. Men and horses suered under the sun’s rays. One of the
pages, dozing in the saddle, let fall the King’s lance, which struck
the steel helmet carried by his companion with a loud clang. The
King shuddered, then, suddenly drawing his sword, spurred his
horse to a charge with the cry, “Forward against the traitors! They
wish to deliver me to the enemy!” Wheeling and charging, he struck
at anyone within reach.
“My God,” cried Burgundy, “the King is out of his mind! Hold
him, someone!” No one dared try. Warding o the blows but unable
to strike back against the King’s person, they milled around in
horror while Charles rushed wildly against this one and that until he
was exhausted, panting, and drenched in sweat. Then his
chamberlain, Guillaume de Martel, whom he much loved, clasped
him from behind while others took his sword and, lifting him from
his horse, laid him gently on the ground. He lay motionless and
speechless, staring with open eyes, recognizing no one. One or more
knights (the number diers in dierent versions) whom he had
killed in his frenzy lay near him in the dust.
Bold as always, Philip of Burgundy seized authority. “We must
return to Mans,” he decided. “This nishes the march on Brittany.”
Laid in a passing oxcart, the King of France was carried back while
an appalled company, some already thinking furiously of the future,
rode alongside. With scarcely a sign of life but his heartbeat, Charles
remained in a coma for four days during which he was thought to
be on his deathbed. His physicians could oer no hope, and other
doctors who were called—Burgundy’s, Orléans’, Bourbon’s—agreed
after consultation that their science was powerless.
As the awful report of the King’s madness spread, rumors of
sorcery and poison were on every tongue, and popular emotion so
aroused that the sick chamber had to be kept open to the public. All
the tears and grief attending a royal demise lled the room and “all
good Frenchmen wept as for an only son, for the health of France
was tied to that of her King.” Sobbing clergy conducted prayers,

bishops led barefoot processions carrying life-size wax gures of the
King to the churches, the people heaped their oerings on relics
known for healing powers, and prostrated themselves before Christ
and the saints to beseech a cure.
Few believed the aiction had natural causes. Some saw it as
Divine anger at the King’s failure to take up arms to end the schism;
others, as God’s warning against that very intention; still others, as
Divine punishment for heavy taxes. Most believed the cause was
sorcery, the more so because a great drought that summer dried up
the ponds and rivers so that cattle died of thirst, waterborne
transport ceased, and merchants claimed the worst losses in twenty
years.
In a morbid time, belief in conspiracy rose to the surface.
Whispers circulated against the Dukes. Why had the “phantom of
the forest” not been arrested and interrogated? Had he been planted
by the Duke of Brittany or by the uncles to cause the King to turn
back? Had the King’s excess of anger caused by the Dukes’ delay
brought on his madness? To allay public suspicions, Burgundy held
a formal inquiry at which the King’s doctors testied to Charles’s
previous illnesses.
Coucy too had summoned his personal physician, the most
venerable and learned in France. He was Guillaume de Harsigny, a
native of Laon aged 92, the same age as the century. After earning
his degree at the University of Paris, he had traveled widely to
enlarge his knowledge, studied under Arab professors at Cairo and
Italians at Salerno, and eventually returned loaded with renown to
his native Picardy. Nothing in human ills was unknown to him.
Under his care—or by natural process coinciding with it—the King’s
fever subsided and intervals of reason returned in which the poor
young man, not yet 25, recognized with horror what had befallen
him. Within a month Charles’s physical recovery had progressed
well enough for Harsigny to take him to the castle of Creil high
above the river Oise, where he could enjoy “the best air in the
region of Paris.” The court overowed with joy and with praise for
the skills of Coucy’s physician.

The rst four days, when Charles had been expected to die, gave
the uncles their opportunity against the Marmosets. “Now is the
hour,” said Berry, “when I shall pay them back in kind.” On the very
day of the King’s attack, someone with quick perception of Fortune’s
Wheel warned the Marmosets to be gone. On the next day while still
at Le Mans, Berry and Burgundy, claiming authority as the King’s
eldest relatives, although in fact Louis was closer to the crown,
dismissed the entire Council, disbanded the army, and seized the
reins of government. Returning to Paris within two weeks, they
convened a subservient Council which duly gave the government to
Philip the Bold on the ground that Louis d’Orléans was too young,
and deposed the Marmosets by judicial process. Rivière and Mercier,
who had been unready to abandon power in time, were arrested and
imprisoned, and their lands, houses, furnishings, and fortune
conscated. A more prescient colleague, Jean de Montagu, reputed
to be a natural son of Charles V, took himself and his fortune to
Avignon the moment he heard of the King’s attack.
The ease of the overturn is almost baing. Only the eclipse of the
King and Clisson’s wounds made it possible. Without royal authority
to support them, Rivière and Mercier had no independent status; no
regent had been named for the six-month-old Dauphin; Louis lacked
the assurance and decisiveness to act, although he might have taken
control if Coucy and Bourbon and the rest of the Council had been
prepared to force the issue against the Dukes. Clearly, they were
not. They could not be sure of military support because the leading
nobles lacked cohesion. In the uncertainty of the King’s condition,
no one knew which way power would jump. Above all, the
Constable was hors de combat.
With sure instinct Coucy seems to have made his choice quickly,
for on August 25 he accepted a mission along with Burgundy’s
chamberlain, Guy de Tremoille, to inform the Duke of Brittany that
the war against him was called o. In the fate of Rivière and
Mercier he played a darker role. Although he had served closely
with Rivière in many joint missions over the past fteen years,
Coucy was one of a group sent to seize his former partner in his
castle, to which he had ed before the order for his arrest. Rivière

was said to have opened his own door to his captors. Ten years
later, after her husband and Coucy were both dead, Rivière’s widow
claimed that Coucy had taken coers containing silver and gold
plate and tapestries from the castle, although no such charge was
ever made during the lifetime of the principals.
In the case of Mercier, however, Coucy beneted openly. By way
of putting him under obligation, the Dukes gave him Mercier’s
principal castle of Nouvion-le-Comte in the diocese of Laon with all
its rents and revenues. A ruler’s bestowal upon one noble of the
conscated property of another was a routine means of attaching
support. Whether or not Coucy had compunctions about accepting,
to have refused would have marked him as an overt opponent of the
Dukes.
In prison, Rivière and Mercier daily expected torture and
execution, the normal fate of those who lost power. Rivière
remained stoic, but Mercier was reputed to have cried so many tears
that he almost lost his eyesight. Every day people came to the Place
de Grève expecting to watch the dispatch of the prisoners. “Prudent,
cold and far-seeing,” Burgundy did not exact the nal penalty. He
preferred to be circumspect while there was still a chance of the
King recovering sovereignty. Charles, as he improved, pressed for
the release of his former councillors, and public opinion, in love and
pity for the King, swung in their favor. Now it was remembered that
Rivière had always been “gentle, courteous, debonair and patient
with poor people.” After eighteen months in prison both were
nally released and banished from court, although their property
was restored, presumably including Coucy’s temporary acquisition.
The dismissal of Clisson was to be Burgundy’s triumph. Forcing
the issue, Clisson came to see him to inquire as Constable about
measures for government of the realm. Philip looked at him
malevolently. “Clisson, Clisson,” he said between his teeth, “you
need not busy yourself with that; the kingdom will be governed
without your oce.” Then, unable to conceal the real source of his
anger, he demanded “where the Devil” Clisson had amassed so great
a fortune, more than his and Berry’s put together. “Get out of my
sight,” he exploded, “for were it not for my honor I would put out

your other eye!” Clisson rode home reectively. That night, under
cover of darkness, he left his hôtel with two attendants by the back
gate and rode to his castle of Montlhéry, just south of Paris, where
he could defend himself.
Raging at his escape, Burgundy again chose Coucy as agent
against his own brother-in-arms. Along with Guy de Tremolile, he
was named to command a force of 300 lances including many
former comrades of the Constable, who were ordered to march by
ve dierent roads and not to return without Clisson dead or alive.
This does not seem to have been one of Burgundy’s more intelligent
moves. Naturally warned by his friends in the party, Clisson escaped
to his fortress of Josselin in Brittany, where on his own ground he
could withstand attack. But his ight enabled Burgundy to use him
as a scapegoat. He was tried in absentia, convicted as a “false and
wicked traitor,” deposed as Constable, banished, and ned 100,000
marks. Louis d’Orléans refused to ratify the proceedings, but
throughout the overturn he never dared openly challenge his uncles.
Once again the Constable’s sword was oered to Coucy, whom
Burgundy was clearly anxious to have in his camp. If the post had
not appealed to him in the last days of Charles V, it had even less
attraction now, nor did he wish to become the beneciary of his
friend’s fall. He “refused positively” to accept it, “even if it meant
that he should be forced to leave France.” The implied risk did not
materialize. Finding Coucy adamant, the uncles gave the post to the
young Comte d’Eu, reportedly so that he might become wealthy
enough to marry Berry’s daughter.
Under the care of Coucy’s physician, the King seemed restored to
sanity by the end of September. Escorted by Coucy, he made a
pilgrimage of thanks to Notre Dame de Liesse, a little church near
Laon commemorating the miracle of three crusaders from Picardy
who, while captives of the Saracens, had converted the daughter of
the Sultan to Christianity and given her a statue of the Virgin, upon
which they were promptly transported by air, along with the
princess, to their native land. Charles returned via Coucy-le-
Château, where in company with the Duke of Burgundy he dined on
October 4, and still escorted by Coucy worshiped at St. Denis on his

way back to Paris. Under the new regime, Coucy remained a leading
member of the Council, dividing his time between attendance at its
sessions and his functions as Lieutenant-General of Auvergne.
To the distress of the court, the wise and ancient Harsigny,
refusing all pleas and oers of riches to remain, insisted on
returning to the quiet of his home at Laon. He was awarded 2,000
gold crowns and the privilege of using four horses from the royal
stables free of charge whenever he might wish to revisit the court.
He never did. Several months later he died, leaving a historic egy.
Harsigny’s tomb was the rst of its kind in the cult of death that
was a legacy of the 14th century. His marble image does not show
him in the pride of life at 33, as was customary in the hope of
resurrection, when the chosen were expected to rise at the same age
as Jesus Christ. Rather, following his specic instructions, the egy
is the visible image of the corpse inside the con. The recumbent
body is shown exactly as it was in death, naked, in the extreme
thinness of very old age with wrinkled skin stretched over the
bones, hands crossed over the genitals, no drapery or covering of
any kind, a stark confession of the nothingness of mortal life.
Before leaving his royal patient, Harsigny had advised against
burdening him with the responsibilities of state. “I give him back to
you in good health,” he had said, “but be careful not to worry or
irritate him. His mind is not yet strong; little by little it will
improve. Burden him with work as little as you can; pleasure and
forgetfulness will be better for him than anything else.” This advice
perfectly suited the Dukes. Sovereign in name only, Charles returned
to Paris to dally with the ladies in the gardens of St. Pol and enjoy
the amusements and festivities organized every night by his wife
and brother. In relief from madness, frivolity abounded and the
uncles did not interfere, “for so long as the Queen and the Duc
d’Orléans danced, they were not dangerous nor even annoying.”
Court purveyors and moneylenders throve, mystery plays and
magicians lled every hour, sorcerers and impostors found
unlimited credulity, fashions went to extremes especially in
hairdressing. Young men curled their locks and trimmed their
beards in two points, while the elaborate braided shells worn by the

ladies over their ears grew so fantastic and enormous that they had
to turn sideways when passing through a doorway. Queen Isabeau
and her sister-in-law Valentina vied with each other in novelties and
opulence; dresses were loaded with jewels, fringes, and fantastical
emblems. In the taverns people murmured against the extravagance
and license. They loved the crowned youth, who for his aability
and openhandedness and easy conversation with all ranks, was
called Charles le Bien-aimé (the Well-beloved), but they deplored
the “foreigners” from Bavaria and Italy and blamed the uncles for
allowing dissipations unbecoming to the King of France.
Thrust to the head of the court as young boys not yet in their
teens, Charles and Louis had none of their father’s care for the
dignity of the crown; they had neither discipline nor sense of
decorum. Deprived of major responsibility, they made up for it in
play, and adults’ play requires constant new excesses to be
entertaining.
On the night when these culminated in horror, Coucy was not
present because he was in Savoy, using his negotiating talents to
settle a tremendous family quarrel which had split the ruling house
and all related noble families and created a crisis of hostility that
threatened to block passage for the march on Rome. The issue,
involving ducal families, dower rights, and of course property,
derived from the fact that the Red Count, Amadeus VII, who had
recently died at the age of 31, had left the guardianship of his son to
his mother, a sister of the Duc de Bourbon, instead of to his wife, a
daughter of the Duc de Berry. It was to take three months before
Coucy and Guy de Tremoille succeeded in negotiating a treaty that
brought the overblown fracas to an end and left the rival Countesses
in “peaceable accord with their subjects.”
On the Tuesday before Candlemas Day (January 28, 1393), four
days after Coucy had left Paris, the Queen gave a masquerade to
celebrate the wedding of a favorite lady-in-waiting who, twice
widowed, was now being married for the third time. A woman’s re-
marriage, according to certain traditions, was considered an
occasion for mockery and often celebrated by a charivari for the
newlyweds with all sorts of license, disguises, disorders, and loud

blaring of discordant music and clanging of cymbals outside the
bridal chamber. Although this was a usage “contrary to all
decency,” says the censorious Monk of St. Denis, King Charles had
let himself be persuaded by dissolute friends to join in such a
charade.
Six young men including the King and Yvain, bastard son of the
Count of Foix, disguised themselves as “wood savages,” in costumes
of linen cloth sewn onto their bodies and soaked in resinous wax or
pitch to hold a covering of frazzled hemp, “so that they appeared
shaggy and hairy from head to foot.” Face masks entirely concealed
their identity. Aware of the risk they ran in torch-lled halls, they
forbade anyone carrying a torch to enter during the dance. Plainly,
an element of Russian roulette was involved, the tempting of death
that has repeatedly been the excitement of highborn and decadent
youth. Certain ways of behavior vary little across the centuries.
Plainly, too, there was an element of cruelty in involving as one of
the actors a man thinly separated from madness.
The deviser of the aair, “cruelest and most insolent of men,” was
one Huguet de Guisay, favored in the royal circle for his outrageous
schemes. He was a man of “wicked life” who “corrupted and
schooled youth in debaucheries,” and held commoners and the poor
in hatred and contempt. He called them dogs, and with blows of
sword and whip took pleasure in forcing them to imitate barking. If
a servant displeased him, he would force the man to lie on the
ground and, standing on his back, would kick him with spurs,
crying, “Bark, dog!” in response to his cries of pain.
In their Dance of the Savages, the masqueraders capered before
the revelers, imitating the howls of wolves and making obscene
gestures while the guests tried to discover their identity. Charles
was teasing and gesticulating before the fteen-year-old Duchesse
de Berry when Louis d’Orléans and Philippe de Bar, arriving from
dissipations elsewhere, entered the hall accompanied by torches
despite the ban. Whether to discover who the dancers were, or
deliberately courting danger—accounts of the episode dier—Louis
held up a torch over the capering monsters. A spark fell, a ame
ickered up a leg, rst one dancer was are, then another. The

Queen, who alone knew that Charles was among the group, shrieked
and fainted. The Duchesse de Berry, who had recognized the King,
threw her skirt over him to protect him from the sparks, thus saving
his life. The room lled with the guests’ sobs and cries of horror and
the tortured screams of the burning men. Guests who tried to stie
the ames and tear the costumes from the writhing victims were
badly burned. Except for the King, only the Sire de Nantouillet, who
ung himself into a large wine-cooler lled with water, escaped.
The Count de Joigny was burned to death on the spot, Yvain de Foix
and Aimery Poitiers died after two days of painful suering. Huguet
de Guisay lived for three days in agony, cursing and insulting his
fellow dancers, the dead and the living, until his last hour. When his
con was carried through the streets, the common people greeted it
with cries of “Bark, dog!”
This ghastly aair, coming so soon after the King’s madness, was
like an exclamation point to the malign succession of events that
had tormented the century. Charles’s narrow escape threw Paris into
a “great commotion,” and anger swept the citizens at the appalling
frivolity which had so casually endangered the life and honor of the
King. Had he died, they said, the people would have massacred the
uncles and all the court; “not one of them would have escaped
death, nor any knight found in Paris.” Alarmed at these dangerous
sentiments with their echo of the Maillotins’ rebellion barely ten
years past, the uncles prevailed on the King to ride in solemn
procession to Notre Dame to appease the people. Behind Charles on
horseback, his uncles and brother followed barefoot as penitents. As
the involuntary agent of the tragedy, Louis was widely reproached
for his dissolute habits. In expiation he built a chapel for the
Célestins with marvelous stained glass and rich altar furnishings and
an endowment for perpetual prayers. He paid for it with revenues
given him by the King from Craon’s conscated property, leaving it
a question as to whose soul was absolved.
The fatal masquerade came to be called the Bal des Ardents—
Dance of the Burning Ones—but it could as well have been called

the Danse Macabre, after a new kind of processional play on the
theme of death that had lately come into vogue. Of uncertain origin
and meaning, the name Macabre rst appeared in writing in a poem
of 1376 by Anjou’s chancellor, Jean le Fèvre, containing the line,
“Je s de Macabré le danse (I do the Danse Macabre). It may have
derived from an older Danse Machabreus, meaning “of the
Maccabees,” or from similarity to the Hebrew word for grave-
diggers and the fact that Jews worked as grave-diggers in medieval
France. The dance itself probably developed under the inuence of
recurring plague, as a street performance to illustrate sermons on
the submission of all alike to Death the Leveler. In murals
illustrating the dance at the Church of the Innocents in Paris, fteen
pairs of gures, clerical and lay, from pope and emperor down the
scale to monk and peasant, friar and child, make up the procession.
“Advance, see yourselves in us,” they say in the accompanying
verses, “dead, naked, rotten and stinking. So will you be.… To live
without thinking of this risks damnation.… Power, honor, riches are
naught; at the hour of death only good works count.… Everyone
should think at least once a day of his loathsome end,” to remind
him to do good deeds and go to mass if he wishes to be redeemed
and escape “the dreadful pain of hell without end which is
unspeakable.”
Each gure speaks his piece: the constable knows that Death
carries o the bravest, even Charlemagne; the knight, once loved by
the ladies, knows that he will make them dance no more; the plump
abbot, that “the fattest rots rst”; the astrologer, that his knowledge
cannot save him; the peasant who has lived all his days in care and
toil and often wished for death, now when the hour has come would
much rather be digging in the vineyards “even in rain and wind.”
The point is made over and over, that here is you and you and you.
The cadaverous gure who leads the procession is not Death but the
Dead One. “It is yourself,” says the inscription under the murals of
the dance at La Chaise-Dieu in Auvergne.
The cult of death was to reach its height in the 15th century, but
its source was in the 14th. When death was to be met any day

around any corner, it might have been expected to become banal;
instead it exerted a ghoulish fascination. Emphasis was on worms
and putrefaction and gruesome physical details. Where formerly the
dominant idea of death was the spiritual journey of the soul, now
the rotting of the body seemed more signicant. Egies of earlier
centuries were serene, with hands joined in prayer and eyes open,
anticipating eternal life. Now, following Harsigny’s example, great
prelates often had themselves shown as cadavers in realistic detail.
To accomplish this, death masks and molds of bodily parts were
made of wax, incidentally promoting portraiture and a new
recognition of individual traits. The message of the egies was that
of the Danse Macabre. Over the scrawny, undraped corpse of
Cardinal Jean de La Grange, who was to die in Avignon in 1402, the
inscription asks observers, “So, miserable one, what cause for
pride?”
The cult of the lugubrious in coming decades made the cemetery
of the Innocents at Paris, with the Danse Macabre painted on its
walls, the most desirable burial place and popular meeting place in
Paris. Charnel houses built into the 48 arches of the cloister were
donated by rich bourgeois and nobles—among them Boucicaut and
Berry—to hold their remains. Because twenty parishes had the right
of burial at the Innocents, the old dead had to be continually
disinterred and their tombstones sold to make room for the new.
Skulls and bones piled up under the cloister arches were an
attraction for the curious, and bleak proof of ultimate leveling.
Shops of all kinds found room in and around the cloister; prostitutes
solicited there, alchemists found a market place, gallants made it a
rendezvous, dogs wandered in and out. Parisians came to tour the
charnel houses, watch burials and disinterments, gaze at the murals,
and read the verses. They listened to daylong sermons and
shuddered as the Dead One blowing his horn entered from the Rue
St. Denis leading his procession of awful dancers.
Art followed the lugubrious. The crown of thorns, rarely pictured
before, became a realistic instrument of pain drawing blood in the
paintings of the second half of the century. The Virgin acquired
seven sorrows, ranging from the ight into Egypt to the Pietà—the

limp dead body of her son lying across her knees. Claus Sluter,
sculptor to the Duke of Burgundy, made the rst known Pietà in
France in 1390 for the convent of Champmol at Dijon. At the same
time, the playful smiling faces of the so-called Beautiful Madonnas
with their gentle draperies and happy infants appear amid the
gloom. Secular painting is gay and exquisite; Death never disturbs
those lyrical picnics beneath enchanted towers.
The Black Death returned for the fourth time in 1388–90. Earlier
recurrences had aected chiey children who had not acquired
immunity, but in the fourth round a new adult generation fell under
the swift contagion. By this time Europe’s population was reduced
to between 40 and 50 percent of what it had been when the century
opened, and it was to fall even lower by mid-15th century. People of
the time rarely mention this startling diminution of their world,
although it was certainly visible to them in reduced trade, in
narrowed areas of cultivation, in abbeys and churches abandoned or
unable to maintain services for lack of revenue, in urban districts
destroyed in war and left unrepaired after sixty years.
On the other hand, it may be that when people were fewer they
ate better, and proportionately more money circulated.
Contradictory conditions are always present. Evidence of growing
business exists alongside that of lowered trade. An Italian merchant
who died in 1410 left 100,000 documents of correspondence with
agents in Italy, France, Spain, England, and Tunisia. The merchant
class had more money at its command than before, and its
expenditures encouraged arts, comforts, and technological advance.
The 14th century was not arid. The tapestry workshops of Arras,
Brussels, and the famous Nicolas Bataille of Paris produced wonders
which robbed stained glass of its primacy in decorative art.
Mariners’ maps reached new eciency, allowing sea monsters to
disappear from the lower corner in favor of accurate coastlines and
navigational aids. Bourgeois money created a new audience for
writers and poets and encouraged literature through the buying of
books. Several thousand scribes were employed turning out copies
to meet the demand of the 25 booksellers and stationarii of Paris.
The amboyant in architecture, with its lavish multitude of

attenuated pinnacles, canopied niches, and lacy buttresses,
expressed not only a technical exuberance but a denial, even a
deance, of decline. How to reconcile with pessimism the Milan
Cathedral, that fantastic mountain of ligree in stone begun in the
last quarter of the century?
Psychological eects are clearer than the physical. Never was so
much written about the miseria of human life, and the sense of
dwindling numbers, even if unmentioned, promoted pessimism
about human fate. “What schal befalle hiereafter, God wot,” wrote
John Gower in England in 1393,
—for now upon this tyde
men se the world on every syde
In sondry wyse so dyversed
That it welnyh stant all reversed.
For men of aairs no less than poets, the insecurity of the time
allowed little condence in the future. The letters of Francesco
Datini, merchant of Prato, show him living in daily dread of war,
pestilence, famine, and insurrection, believing neither in the
stability of government nor in the honesty of colleagues. “The earth
and the sea are full of robbers,” he wrote to one of his partners,
“and the great part of mankind is evilly disposed.”
Gerson believed he lived in the senility of the world when society,
like some delirious old man, suered from fantasies and illusions.
He, like others, felt the time was at hand for the coming of Anti-
Christ and the end of the world—to be followed by a better one. In
popular expectation, Apocalypse would bring the return of a great
emperor—a second Charlemagne, a third Frederick, an imperial
messiah—who, coupled with an angelic pope, would reform the
Church, renew society, and save Christendom. Churchmen and
moralists in apocalyptic mood stressed more than ever the vanity of
worldly things—though without visibly diminishing anyone’s desire
for, and pride in, possessions.
A pessimistic view of man’s fate was the duty of the clergy in
order to prove the need of salvation. It was by no means new to the

14th century. If Cardinal d’Ailly thought the time of Anti-Christ was
at hand, so had Thomas Aquinas a hundred years before. If the
corruption of the Church dismayed the devout, it had done so no
less in the year 1040 when a monk of Cluny wrote, “For whensoever
religion hath failed among the pontis … what can we think but
that the whole human race, root and branch, is sliding willingly
down again into the gulf of primaeval chaos?” If in a waning period
Mézières’ favorite dictum was “The things of this eeting world go
ever from bad to worse,” he was matched by Roger Bacon, who had
asserted in 1271, at the height of a dynamic period, “More sins
reign in these days than in any past age … justice perisheth, all
peace is broken.”
The sentiments were not new, but in the 14th century they were
more pervasive and more disparaging of the human kind. “Time
past had virtue and righteousness, but today reigns only vice,” is
Deschamps’ lament. How may safe-conducts be trusted? asks
Christine de Pisan, discussing the failures of chivalry, “seeing the
little truth and delity that this day runneth through all the world.”
Elsewhere she writes, “All good customs fail and virtues are held at
discount. Learning which once governed is now of no account.” Her
complaint had some justication, for even the University had taken
to selling degrees in theology to candidates unwilling to undertake
its long and dicult studies or fearful of failing the examination.
License to grant the degree was extended to other universities, even
to towns which had no university, giving rise to the sarcastic saying,
“Why not [a degree] from a pigsty?” Denouncing the age for
decadence was in fashion, but the decadence was felt as real, and
the sense of a moral decline from some better day in the past was
insistent. The poets wrote for the very circles they denounced and
they must have touched some responsive chord. Deschamps—who
never left o scolding—was made chamberlain to Louis d’Orléans in
1382.
All ranks of life shared in the blame. Deeply shaken by the
Peasants’ Revolt, Gower wrote a jeremiad on the corruptions of the
age called Vox Clamantis, in which he unfolds a “manifold pestilence
of vices” among poor as well as rich. The unknown author of

another indictment entitled it “Vices of the Dierent Orders of
Society,” and found all equally at fault: the Church is sunk in schism
and simony, clergy and monks are in darkness, kings, nobles, and
knights given over to indulgence and rapine, merchants to usury
and fraud; law is a creature of bribery; the commons are plunged in
ignorance and oppressed by robbers and murderers.
Mankind was at one of history’s ebbs. At mid-century the Black
Death had raised the question of God’s hostility to man, and events
since then had oered little reassurance. To contemporaries the
miseria of the time reected sin, and, indeed, sin in the form of
greed and inhumanity abounded. On the downward slope of the
Middle Ages man had lost condence in his capacity to construct a
good society.
The yearning for peace and for an end to the schism was widely
voiced. A notary of Cahors said at this time that in all 36 years of
his life he had never known his diocese without war. Thoughtful
observers, conscious of social damage, called for peace as the only
hope of reform, of re-uniting the Church, and of resisting the Turks,
who had reached the Danube. In his Dream of the Old Pilgrim,
written in 1389 to persuade Charles VI and Richard II to make
peace, Mézières draws a pathetic and dramatic picture of an old
woman in torn clothes, with disheveled gray hair, leaning on a cane
and carrying a little book gnawed by rats. She was called Devotion,
but is now called Despair because dwellers of her kingdom are in
slavery to Mohammed, Christian trade is endangered, the eastern
ramparts of Christendom menaced by enemies of the Faith.
“Veniat Pax!,” the cry of Gerson’s famous sermon of fteen years
later, was already sounding in people’s minds. Few could tell what
the war was fought for. In England, Gower thought it no longer a
just war but one prolonged by “greedy lords” for gain. Let it be
over, he cried, “so that the world may stand appeased.” French
peasants may be heard, if Deschamps is a good reporter, discussing
the war as they reap. “It has gone on long enough,” says Robin, “I

know no one who does not fear it. Surely the whole thing is not
worth a scallion.”
“Nevertheless,” replies hunchback Henry, sadly wise,
“Each will have to take up his shield,
For we’ll have no peace till they give back Calais.”
That is the refrain of each stanza and that was the sticking point.
Anxious as they might be for an end to the state of war, the rulers of
France were not prepared to conclude a permanent peace that left
the open gate of Calais in English hands.
For the Duke of Burgundy, peace was a pressing necessity in order
to restore the commerce between Flanders and England. It could
only have been with his approval that a holy man called Robert the
Hermit appeared at court, sponsored by the King’s chamberlain,
Guillaume Martel, to bring word that peace was Heaven’s command.
When returning from Palestine, the Hermit said, a voice had spoken
to him out of a terrible storm at sea, telling him that he would
survive the peril and that on reaching land he must go to the King
and tell him to make peace with England, and warn that all who
opposed it would pay dearly. Peace had its opponents as well as
advocates.
The most important advocate—and most signicant change in the
situation—was the King of England. As autocratic as his father, but
no soldier, Richard II wanted to end the war in order to reduce the
power of the barons and promote a more absolute monarchy. His
wish coincided with that of the Duke of Lancaster, who, having
established his daughters as Queens of Castile and Portugal, wanted
peace with France to protect their interests. “Let my brother
Gloucester go make war on Sultan Bajazet, who is menacing
Christendom on the frontiers of Hungary,” he said; that was the
proper sphere for those anxious to ght.
Through the joint eorts of Lancaster and Burgundy, parley was
resumed in May 1393 at Leulinghen, a war-torn village on the banks
of the Somme near Abbeville. For lack of housing, the delegates—
Burgundy and Berry for France, Lancaster, Gloucester, and the

Archbishop of York for England—and their retinues lived in tents,
among which Philip of Burgundy’s was naturally the focus of all
eyes. It was made of painted canvas in the form of a castle with
turrets and crenellated walls and a portcullis guarding the entrance
beween two towers of wood. The main hall inside gave onto many
separate apartments divided by little streets.
King Charles was theoretically if not actively present, housed in a
nearby Benedictine abbey with a ne enclosed garden on the banks
of the beautiful river. With his mind xed on the adventure of
crusade, the King of France, like the King of England, was ready to
close a struggle begun before either of them had been born.
Meetings of the parley were held in a chapel with a thatched roof
and walls hung with tapestries depicting ancient battles to conceal
the ruined murals behind. When Lancaster remarked that the
delegates should not be looking at scenes of war when treating of
peace, the tapestries were hurriedly removed and replaced by scenes
of the last days of Christ. As senior uncles, Berry and Lancaster sat
on elevated chairs with Burgundy and Gloucester next to them, and
counts, prelates, knights, learned lawyers, and clerks ranged along
the walls. Among the delegates moved a royal visitor, Leon V de
Lusignan, called King of Armenia although in fact all that remained
of his realm was Cyprus. Having lost that too to the Turks, he was a
fervent voice importuning both the French Dukes and the English
for a crusade.
The schism became an issue when Pope Clement sent the noble
Spanish Cardinal Pedro de Luna, well supplied with gold and
magnicent gifts, to urge the legitimacy of the Avignonese papacy
on the English. Angrily Lancaster said to him, “It is you, Cardinals of
Avignon, who gave [the schism] birth, you who sustain it, you who
augment it every day. Woe to you!” Burgundy did not argue the
issue. He oered to ignore the schism in order to move the parley
toward a treaty, leaving it to the University to work out the means
of re-uniting the Church.
When it came to the French demand for the razing of Calais and
the English demand for fulllment of all the terms of the Treaty of
Brétigny, the parties were as far apart as ever. Calais was “the last

town we would ever give up,” the English said, while the French
insisted that territories which had resolutely refused to give their
allegiance to England could not be forcibly transferred. At this
impasse each side discreetly dropped pursuit of its major demand
and moved to take up smaller issues one by one.
Dour and suspicious, Gloucester resisted every proposal. He
complained that the French used ambiguous language, lled with
“subtle cloaked words of double understanding” which they turned
and twisted to their advantage—such words as Englishmen did not
use, “for their speech and intent is plain.” Already the stereotype of
the crafty Frenchman and blu Englishman was operating. At
Gloucester’s insistence, the English required that all proposals be
reduced to writing so that they could carefully examine any wording
which they found obscure or susceptible of two constructions. Then
they would send their clerks to learn how the French understood it,
and afterward require it to be either amended or removed, thereby
lengthening procedures tediously.
Here was a real cause of diculty in peace-making. Although
English lords were French-speaking, the language was acquired, not
native, and they did not feel secure in it. So great a noble as the rst
Duke of Lancaster, who wrote the Livre des sainctes médecines, says of
his work, “If the French is not good I should be excused, because I
am English and not well versed in French.” Gloucester made the
language problem an excuse for dragging his heels and delaying
agreement, but mistrust of the French was real. Ever since Charles
V’s manipulation of the clauses of the Treaty of Brétigny, the
English had approached—and balked at—settlements in fear of
being gulled.
To inuence Gloucester by his divine mission and eloquence,
Robert the Hermit was summoned to the conference by Burgundy.
In passionate words the holy man begged the Duke, “For the love of
God, do not longer oppose the peace.” While the war of English and
French tore Christianity apart, Bajazet and his Turks advanced. The
duty of Christians, he pleaded, was to unite against the indel.
“Ha, Robert,” replied Gloucester, “I wish not to prevent a peace,
but you Frenchmen use so many colored words beyond our

understanding that, when you will, you make them signify war or
peace as you shall choose … dissembling always until you have
gained your end.” Nevertheless, Gloucester had to subdue his
intransigence in deference to the wishes of the royal nephew he
despised. Short of an agreement on Calais, permanent peace was
still elusive, but some progress was made in that the truce was
extended for four years, during which various disputed territories
were to revert to either side, clearing the way for nal settlement.
In June, while the last clauses were being argued, madness again
engulfed the King of France. Like the illness at Amiens
foreshadowing his rst attack, the second seizure coincided with a
peace parley. Perhaps impatience at the long-drawn-out proceedings
was a disturbing factor. This time the insanity returned more
seriously than before and lasted for a longer period of eight months.
For the rest of his life, which was not to end until 1422, thirty years
after the rst attack, Charles was intermittently mad, with
remissions just often enough to preclude any stable government and
to exacerbate the power struggle around a half-empty throne. In
these thirty years the vicious contest between the factions of Orléans
and Burgundy and the successors of each was to bring back the
English and reduce France to a state as shattered and helpless as in
the aftermath of Poitiers.
In the t of 1393 the King’s spirit “was covered by such heavy
shadows” that he could not remember who or what he was. He did
not know he was King, that he was married, that he had children, or
that his name was Charles. He displayed two pronounced aversions:
for the eur-de-lys entwined with his own name or initials in the
royal coat-of-arms, which he tried to deface in rage wherever he
saw it, and for his wife, from whom he ed in terror. If she
approached him, he would cry, “Who is that woman the sight of
whom torments me? Find out what she wants and free me from her
demands if you can, that she may follow me no more.” When he saw
the arms of Bavaria, he danced in front of them, making rude
gestures. He failed to recognize his children although he knew his
brother, uncles, councillors, and servants, and remembered the
names of those long dead. Only his brother’s neglected wife, sad

Valentina, for whom he asked constantly, calling her his “dear
sister,” could soothe him. This preference naturally gave rise to
rumors, fostered by the Burgundian faction, that Valentina had
bewitched him by subtle poison. Given credence by the record of
Visconti crimes and the Italian reputation for poisoning, the
whisperers charged that Valentina was ambitious for greater place,
having been told by her notorious father to make herself Queen of
France.
Madness was familiar in the Middle Ages in all its varieties.
William of Hainault-Bavaria, a nephew of Queen Philippa of
England, “tall, young, strong, dark and lively,” had been a raving
maniac conned in a castle for thirty years, most of the time with
both hands and feet tied. Suerers from lesser derangement were
generally not conned but moved among their neighbors like the
deformed, the spastic, the scrofulous, and other mists, and joined
in the pilgrimages to Rocamadour in search of a cure. Madness as
often as not was seen as curable and understood as a natural
phenomenon caused by mental or emotional stress. Rest and sleep
were prescribed, as well as bleeding, baths, ointments, potions made
from metal, and happiness. Equally, it was seen as an aiction by
God or the Devil to be treated by exorcism or by shaving a cross in
the hair of the victim’s head or tying him to the rood screen in
church so that his condition might be improved by hearing mass.
No physician or treatment helped Charles VI in his later seizures.
An unkempt, evil-eyed charlatan and pseudo-mystic named Arnaut
Guilhem was allowed to treat Charles on his claim of possessing a
book given by God to Adam by means of which man could
overcome all aiction resulting from original sin. A prototype
Rasputin who had gained the condence of the Queen and courtiers,
he insisted that the King’s malady was caused by sorcery, but,
failing himself to summon superior forces, was eventually ousted.
Other quacks and remedies of all kinds were tried to no avail. Even
doctors of the University called for discovery and punishment of the
“sorcerers.” On one occasion two Augustinian friars, after gaining no
results from magic incantations and a liquid made from powdered
pearls, proposed to cut incisions in the King’s head. When this was

disallowed, the friars accused the King’s barber and the Duc
d’Orléans’ concierge of sorcery and, when they were acquitted,
rashly transferred the accusation against Orléans himself. In
consequence, the friars were brought to trial and torture, confessed
themselves liars, sorcerers, and idolators in league with the Devil,
and, on being divested of clerical status, were handed over to the
secular arm and executed.
The obsession with sorcery in Charles’s case reected a rising
belief in the occult and demonic. Times of anxiety nourish belief in
conspiracies of evil, which in the 14th century were seen as the
work of persons or groups with access to diabolical aid. Hence the
rising specter of the witch. By the 1390s witchcraft had been
ocially recognized by the Inquisition as equivalent to heresy. The
Church was on the defensive, torn apart by the schism, challenged
in authority and doctrine by aggressive movements of dissent, beset
by cries for reform. Like the ordinary man, it felt surrounded by
malevolent forces, of which sorcerers and witches were seen as the
agents carrying out the will of the Evil One. It was during this time,
in 1398, that theologians of the University of Paris held the solemn
conclave which declared the black arts to be infecting society with
renewed vigor.
The poor mad King was a victim of these beliefs. “In the name of
Jesus Christ,” he cried, weeping in his agony, “if there is any one of
you who is an accomplice in this evil I suer, I beg him to torture
me no longer but let me die!” After this piteous outburst, the
government, in the hope of appeasing the anger of Heaven, passed
an ordinance providing severe penalties for blasphemers and
permitting confessors to attend prisoners condemned to die. Further,
the Porte de l’Enfer (Gate of Hell) was renamed the Porte St. Michel.
In later years the King’s seizures came and went unpredictably. In
one year, 1399, he suered six attacks, each more serious than the
last until he was cowering in a corner believing himself made of
glass or roaming the corridors howling like a wolf. In his intervals of
sanity Charles wished to resume the function of kingship, though it
had to be in mainly ceremonial capacity. At these times he is said to
have resumed marital relations with Isabeau, who gave birth to four

more children between 1395 and 1401—in itself no proof of
paternity.
Frivolous and sensuous, still an alien with a thick German accent,
humiliated by her husband’s mad aversion, Isabeau abandoned
Charles to his valets and to a girl she supplied to ll her place, a
horse-dealer’s daughter named Odette de Champdivers, who
resembled her and was called by the public “the little Queen.” The
Queen herself turned to frantic pleasures and to adultery combined
with political intrigue and a passionate pursuit of money. Insecure
in France, she devoted herself to amassing a personal fortune and
promoting the enrichment and interests of her Bavarian family. She
extracted from Charles, lucid or not, assignments in her own and her
children’s names of land, revenues, residences, and separate
household accounts. She acquired coers of treasure and jewels
which she stored in a variety of vaults. Her sway at court grew ever
more extravagant and hectic, the ladies’ dresses more low-necked,
the amours more scandalous, the festivities more extreme. The
Queen established a Court of Love at which both sexes took the
parts of advocates and judges and discussed, according to a scornful
contemporary, “in this ridiculous tribunal the most ridiculous
questions.”
Court life can produce ennui and disgust even in a Queen. In
nostalgia for the bucolic, 400 years before Marie Antoinette, Isabeau
built a Hotel des Bergères (House of the Shepherds) at her property of
St. Ouen, complete with gardens and elds, barn, stable, sheepfold,
and dovecote, where she played at farming and took care of
chickens and livestock. The King, as time went on, was rumored to
be neglected to the point of penury, living unclean and even hungry
in apartments where the paper windowpanes were torn and pigeons
entered to leave their droppings. During one return of sanity he
arrested the Queen’s chamberlain and current paramour, had him
imprisoned in chains, questioned under torture, and afterward
secretly drowned in the Seine.
In the political struggle Isabeau attached herself where power lay.
When Louis d’Orléans was named Regent, she joined him against
Burgundy and was generally supposed to have become his mistress.

When he was assassinated by Burgundy’s son and successor, John
the Fearless, she changed sides and moved into the camp and bed of
Louis’ murderer. In the vacuum created by a living but helpless
King, France oundered, and the Queen, lacking any capacity to
cope, became the tool of the ruthless forces—Burgundy and England
—which moved into the vacuum. Hard-pressed in Paris, separated
geographically and politically from the Dauphin, unable to mobilize
support, she nally agreed to the infamous treaty which named the
King of England heir to the throne of France in place of her own
son. In the end, obese and depraved, she outlived her husband by
fteen years and was eventually to nd an all too imaginative
biographer in the Marquis de Sade.
Looking back from a perspective of some 200 years, the Duc de
Sully, Henri IV’s chief minister, characterized the reign of Charles VI
as “pregnant with sinister events … the grave of good laws and good
morals in France.”

Chapter 25

W
Lost Opportunity
hile the peace parley was meeting at Leulinghen in May-
June 1393, Coucy was conferring with Pope Clement in
Avignon, where he had gone after settling the Savoyard
quarrel. His mission was the start of a major thrust over
the next two years to install Clement in Rome and the French in the
Papal States, transformed into a Kingdom of Adria. Both eorts
turned upon the cooperation of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, whose
concern in the venture was not so much the fate of the papacy as
the expansion of Milan. Although personally religious, he seems to
have had no strong feelings about one Pope or another, nor about
the schism except to use it in his own interests. His object was to
break the power of Florence and Bologna by drawing France into
Italy in alliance with Milan.
Introspective, intelligent, rich, and melancholy, Gian Galeazzo
was the master of realpolitik in Italy. His grasp had reached across
the north, absorbing Verona, Padua, Mantua, and Ferrara, and
probed down into Tuscany and the Papal States. He may have been
aiming at a Kingdom of Lombardy, perhaps even of a united Italy, or
he may have been playing the game for power’s sake. In the politics
of the schism, he ran a tortuous course between his Milanese
subjects, who were loyal to the Roman Pope, and partnership with
France, which meant opting for Clement. How he intended to sail
through these straits was not clear. It was he, however, who had
revived the idea that France should resume pursuit of the Kingdom
of Adria, with his son-in-law Louis of Orléans as beneciary. This
scheme—which was now the object of Coucy’s mission—had been
argued with fervor and nesse by Visconti’s seventy-year-old
ambassador in Paris, Niccolo Spinelli, one of the ablest diplomats of
the day. The Papal States, Spinelli argued, had earned nothing but

hatred for the Holy See. In the thousand years since they had been
given to the papacy, the most violent wars had been waged on their
account, “yet the priests neither possess them in peace nor ever will
be able to possess them.” It would be better that they should
renounce temporal lordship entirely “as a burden not only for
themselves but for all Christians, especially Italians.”
The French needed no persuasion to assume the burden, but they
wanted the kingdom ocially bestowed on Louis as a papal ef
before they attempted its physical conquest. The Pope, however,
wanted to have the Papal States in hand before he gave them away.
Coucy, as the supreme persuader and the Frenchman best
acquainted with the labyrinth of Italian politics, was charged with
the task of convincing Clement to make the commitment in advance
of conquest. He was accompanied on the mission by the Bishop of
Noyon, a fellow member of the Royal Council known for his
oratorical talants, and by the King’s secretary, Jean de Sains, to keep
the record. In “eloquent discourse,” Coucy and the Bishop told the
Pope that, failing a miracle, only the intervention of France could
end the schism; alone Clement could do nothing. By enfeong Louis
with the Kingdom of Adria, the Pope would regain a rm annual
income from the patrimony, which had never been under papal
control since the removal to Avignon. The King of France, the
envoys said, recommended his brother as the person best tted to
undertake the conquest because “he is young and can work hard”
and will have the aid of the Lord of Milan.
Clement balked on the grounds that he did not want to be known
as the “liquidator of the papal heritage.” That had not bothered him
ten years before when he had given the Bull of Enfeoment to the
Duc d’Anjou, but he was no longer so sure of French capacity. Three
French cardinals were called in for advice, including Jean de La
Grange, Cardinal of Amiens, he who had once frightened Charles VI
by his supposed intercourse with a familiar demon. He wanted some
hard answers: how much money, how many men would France
commit to the campaign, and how long would they be maintained in
Italy? He wanted a promise of 2,000 men-at-arms led by substantial
captains and nobles and supported by 600,000 francs a year for

three years. The embarrassed envoys could not reply; their
instructions of no less than seventeen “items” had contained nothing
about military specics. Cardinal de La Grange suggested smoothly
that the Duc d’Orléans might begin his campaign and be enfeoed
with what he conquered as he progressed. Although they stayed for
six weeks, Coucy and the Bishop could obtain no more than
Clement’s promise to send his own envoys to Paris for further
discussion.
In France, the failure to conclude peace and the renewal of the
King’s madness—intensifying, the struggle between Burgundy and
Orléans—weakened the impetus for the Way of Force. The French
were not prepared to move into Italy until they had settled with
England. Indeed, when the English got wind of French plans, they
conveyed a warning that they would break the truce if France took
up arms against the Roman Pope. Mistrusting Gloucester’s war
party, the French sent heralds through the realm to order
strengthening of defenses and repair of crumbling walls. In a
renewed eort to train archers, an ordinance was issued prohibiting
games. Tennis, which the common people were adopting in
imitation of the nobles, and soules, a form of eld hockey popular
with the bourgeois and seldom played without broken bones, as well
as dice and cards, were banned in the hope of encouraging practice
in archery and the crossbow. This was the same eort Charles V had
made in 1368 and it shows that the rulers were acutely conscious of
the failure of French archery.
Skills were not lacking; the trouble was that French tactics did not
allow archery an essential place. Combined action of archers and
knights was not adopted; crossbow companies were hired and barely
used. The reason was clearly a mixture of contempt for the
commoner and fear for chivalry’s primacy in battle. By 1393 the
added fear of insurrection caused the new ordinance to have a short
life. After a period during which practice with the bow and
crossbow became very popular, the nobles insisted that the ban on
games be revoked, fearing that the common people would gain too
eective a weapon against the noble estate. They were caught in

that common irony of human endeavor when one self-interest
cancels out another.
Conicting pressures were rising around the Voie de Fait. The
Florentines sent an imposing mission of sixteen envoys to Paris to
plead against a French alliance with Gian Galeazzo. They found an
ally in the Duke of Burgundy, who, because of his Flemish subjects,
had never been a strong partisan of Clement and was certainly not
prepared to help him to Rome if it meant advancing Louis to be
King of Adria as well as Regent. The Duke in turn found an ally—
although he despised her—in Queen Isabeau, who would have
supped with the Devil to harm Gian Galeazzo.
Publicly, the strongest inuence against the Voie de Fait was that
of the University, stronghold of the intellectual clerical
establishment. Clerics of the University had never been happy with
the Babylon of Avignon. Its consequences in simony and corruption
and increasing materialism, in loss of prestige, in rise of protest and
movements of dissent among Lollards and mystics, in nationalism
stimulated by the French attempt to dominate the papacy and
sharpened by rival states taking opposite sides in the sehism, had
brought the Church to low esteem. Historically, the breaking-up of
the old unity of the Faith and the rise of nationalism were advanced,
but not caused, by the schism. On the river of history, universality
lay behind and break-up ahead, but men see what is immediately at
hand and what they saw at the close of the 14th century was the
schism’s damage to society and a desperate need to re-unite the
Church.
The faculty of theology was now openly advocating the Way of
Cession despite the edict banning discussion of the subject. Gerson,
in oral defense of his thesis on “Spiritual Jurisdiction” for a degree
in theology in 1392, provided the doctrinal basis for mutual
abdication of the popes. “If it is not protable for the common good
that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished,” he
argued, and boldly asserted that to retain authority in such case was
mortal sin. Further, anyone who did not actively aid in ending the

schism was morally guilty of prolonging it. This was a pointed
reference to clerics willing enough to live with two papacies because
of the increased number of beneces the situation provided.
Gerson’s public statement in Paris was a signal of the growing
pressure, emphasized by Chancellor d’Ailly’s presence in the chair. It
attested also to Burgundy’s protection, without which Gerson could
never have dared to be so forthright.
In opposition, the drive for Italy was suddenly galvanized by a
new oer made to Louis d’Orléans. He was asked to accept the
sovereignty of Genoa, where domestic strife had reached that
baleful point at which the foreigner is invited in. Whether the
scheme was inspired by Gian Galeazzo, who wanted Genoa as a port
for Milan, is unknown, but he clearly favored it in the belief that
under his son-in-law’s sovereignty, Genoa would be at his disposal.
For Louis it was an extraordinary stroke of fortune, a foothold in the
sun more achievable than his cousin Anjou’s still unrealized claim to
Naples, and a major step on the way to Adria.
His rst act was to send Coucy again to Avignon accompanied by
his personal representative, Jean de Trie, in addition to the Bishop
of Noyon and the King’s secretary as before. They were to ask again
for the enfeoment of Adria while postponing its conquest and the
march on Rome for three or four years. The delay was intended to
give Louis time to succeed in Genoa. Again the cardinals bargained
closely—for money, for troops, for signed commitments by Charles
and his brother, and other conditions which virtually precluded the
Way of Force. But Clement at long last may have recognized that he
was only precluding what had never been feasible. After many
delays and excuses, which kept Coucy and his colleagues in Avignon
for three months, they succeeded in obtaining the document of
enfeoment, to be conrmed as a Bull only when the King of France
and his brother had approved the conditions. The envoys left
Avignon on September 3, 1394. Two weeks later their entire eort
was revealed as vain when they heard the stunning news that
Clement was dead.
The schism which had raised Clement to the papacy was his
executioner, by the hand of the University of Paris. Since January,

when King Charles had recovered his reason, the University had
been pressing hard for an audience to present its views. So far, the
Duc de Berry, as Clement’s warmest partisan, had blocked any such
hearing, answering the University’s appeals with violent reproaches
and threats to “put to death and throw into the river the principal
promoters of this aair.” These vigorous sentiments were induced
by “rich presents” received from Clement, who, having learned of
the University’s intentions, sent Cardinal de Luna to Paris to exert
the nancial persuasion that Berry best understood. At some point
Burgundy must have oered his brother cogent argument to the
contrary, for, in a surprising reversal, Berry suddenly replied to
petitioners, “If you nd a remedy acceptable to the Council, we will
adopt it that very hour.”
Cession, as enunciated by Gerson, was already the University’s
remedy. To give it as much public weight as possible, the faculty
organized a popular referendum, with a ballot box placed in the
cloister of St. Mathurin in which people were to drop their votes for
a solution. From 10,000 votes counted by 54 masters of the dierent
faculties, three solutions emerged, not including the Way of Force.
Referendums do not commonly endorse an unwanted result. The
Three Ways now proposed were, rst, mutual abdication; second, if
both popes continued obdurate, arbitration by a selected group;
third, a General Council of the Church. The last was considered least
desirable because a General Council was believed certain to divide
into existing factions from which the schism would emerge as alive
as ever.
Destined to dominate the opening decades of the next century,
recourse to a Council was already a lengthening shadow. Both popes
naturally detested it because it detracted from their authority. The
theory of conciliar supremacy held that supreme authority in the
Church lay in the General Council, from which the Pope derived his
powers. “Some perverse men,” raged Clement’s rival, Boniface IX,
“trusting in the arm of the esh against the Lord, call for a Council.
O damned and damnable impiety!”
Nevertheless, as hope of joint abdication faded, theologians on
both sides increasingly discussed a Council and debated its

problems. Who would convoke it? What was its legitimacy if
convoked by temporal rulers? Did it have authority over the person
of a Pope? If summoned by one ponticate in the present impasse,
would its decisions be accepted by the other? How might both popes
and both hierarchies ever be persuaded to act in concert? On June
30, 1394, a French royal audience heard the forbidden subject
relentlessly exposed.
Arranged by Philip of Burgundy to present the University’s
ndings from the referendum, the audience was held in great
solemnity. The King was on his throne, with the royal Dukes and
principal prelates, nobles, and ministers in attendance. The
argument for cession in the form of a 23-page letter to the King was
read by the Rector of the University, Nicolas de Clamanges, a friend
of Gerson and d’Ailly. One of the humanists within the University,
he was considered the nest Latin stylist in France and an orator
unmatched for his “Ciceronian eloquence.”
Clerical polemic in the Middle Ages was not cool. In a tirade of
invective hurled at both popes, Clamanges piled up passion and
hyperbole in his depiction of the suering of the Church and the
urgent and immediate need for a cure. Whichever of the two popes
refused to accept one of the Three Ways, he proclaimed, should be
treated as a “hardened schismatic and consequently a heretic”; a
ravisher, not a pastor, of his ock; a “devouring wolf,” not a
shepherd, who should be driven from the fold of Christendom. If in
their overcondence the popes postponed any longer the oered
remedy, they “will repent too late of having neglected reform … the
harm will be incurable.… The world, for so long unhappy, is now on
a dangerous slope toward evil.”
“Do you think,” he cried, in the eternal voice of protest, “that
people will suer forever your bad government? Who do you think
can endure, among so many other abuses, your mercenary
appointments, your multiple sale of beneces, your elevation of men
without honesty or virtue to the most eminent positions?” Every day
prelates are appointed who “know nothing of saintliness, nothing of
honesty.” Exposed to their extortions, “the priesthood has become a
misery reduced to profaning its calling … by selling relics and

crosses and chalices and putting at auction the mystic rites of the
sacrament.” Some churches hold no services at all. If the early
Church fathers returned to earth, “they would nd no vestige of
their piety, no remnant of their devotion, no shadow of the Church
they knew.”
He spoke of Christianity as a laughingstock among the indels,
who hope that “our Church thus divided against herself will destroy
herself by her own hands.” He pointed to the rise of heretics, whose
poison “like gangrene makes progress every day.” He predicted that
worse would come as internal strife within the Catholic Faith
promoted dissension and disrespect. He raised all the arguments
against a General Council and deated each, quoting the Old
Testament—Psalms, the Prophets, and the Book of Job—to establish
its authority. “Has there ever been, will there ever be,” he
thundered, “a more urgent necessity for a Council than at this
moment when the whole Church is convulsed in its discipline, its
morals, its laws, its institutions, its traditions and oldest practices,
spiritual as well as temporal—at this moment when it is menaced by
frightful and irreparable ruin?”
Turning to the King, he did not hesitate to refer to Charles’s
personal tragedy, saying that if God had answered prayers to restore
the King, it must be that he might awake to the interests of his
people and of Holy Church, to eradicate “this horrible schism” and
the miseria in its train. In the name of the University, he exhorted
Charles to take the lead at once in working for a remedy if he did
not wish to lose his title as Most Christian King.
Ignorant of Latin, the language of the oration, Charles listened
graciously without understanding a word. Afterward a translation
was ordered for the Royal Council, whose lay members, too,
evidently knew no Latin. Clamanges’ impassioned plea was ignored.
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let
politics predominate, and the politics that the court was currently
engaged in was the eort, promoted by Louis and resisted by
Burgundy, to establish Louis in Italy. The University was ordered by
the King—or in his name—to abstain from further agitation. Its
reply was to suspend courses in what amounted to a strike by the

faculty, a method used successfully against a tax levy in 1392
although at the cost of many foreign students leaving Paris.
The University also circulated Clamanges’ letter throughout
Europe, not least to the See of Avignon, where it was presented to
the Pope in a full assembly of cardinals. After reading a few lines,
Clement’s eyes lled with anger and he exclaimed, “This letter
defames the Holy See! It is wicked, it is venomous!” Denouncing it
as a calumny that “does not deserve to be read in public or private,”
he left the room in a rage and would neither listen nor speak to
anyone. The cardinals read the letter through and, after conferring
among themselves, concluded that postponement was indeed
dangerous and that the Pope would have to accept the University’s
program. Summoned by Clement when he learned of their
conference, they advised him that if he had the good of the Church
at heart he must choose one of the Three Ways. Such was his
indignation at this “traitorous cowardice” that within three days, on
September 16, he died of a heart attack or apoplectic stroke, or,
according to his contemporaries, of “profound chagrin.” So ended
Robert of Geneva, to be ultimately recorded as Anti-Pope by the
Church.
The news of his death reached Paris six days later on September
22. Here at last was the moment to re-unite the Church painlessly,
without use of force or a General Council—if the election of a
successor to Clement could be prevented. “Never again will there be
such an opportunity,” wrote the University to the cardinals; “it is as
though the Holy Ghost stood at the door and knocked.” The Royal
Council immediately dispatched a message in the name of the King
to the Avignon cardinals, exhorting them “in the interests of all
Christianity” to postpone their conclave until they received a
“special and solemn” letter from the King of France which would
follow.
Led by Marshal Boucicaut, the royal messengers galloped for
Avignon, covering the 400 miles in the record time of four days.
When they arrived, the conclave was already in session. The
cardinals were anxious for union, but not at their own expense.
They had been persuaded by the suave Spaniard, Cardinal de Luna,

a former professor of canon law, that their position depended on
their right of election, which must not be abridged. Divining the
contents of the King’s letter, they decided not to open it until the
election was accomplished. But lest they be charged with sustaining
the schism, they agreed to sign a written oath binding whichever of
them was elected to resign if a majority of the cardinals called on
him to do so. The oath bound them to work diligently for union of
the Church “without fraud, deceit or machination whatsoever,” and
sincerely to examine without excuse or delay all possible ways to
that goal “even to the point of ceding the papacy, if necessary.”
Eighteen of 21 cardinals signed, among them the most fervent
exponent of union, Cardinal Pedro de Luna of Aragon.
In the conclave, when the name of one cardinal was proposed for
election, he confessed in an agony of honesty, “I am weak and
perhaps would not abdicate. Do not expose me to temptation!”
“I on the other hand,” spoke up Cardinal de Luna, “would
abdicate as easily as I take o my hat.” All eyes turned to look at
the colleague, now in his sixties, who had been a cardinal ever since
the stormy election in Rome that had precipitated the schism. A
learned and clever man of noble birth, subtle in diplomacy, austere
in private life, an expert manipulator, he was a rigid opponent of
Council though an ardent advocate of union. He was elected as
Clement’s successor on September 28, taking the name of Benedict
XIII.
The second French embassy heard the news on their way to
Avignon. On their arrival, the new Pope assured them of his intent
to pursue every means of ending the schism and repeated his
statement that he would abdicate if so advised as easily as taking o
his hat, which he lifted from his head in illustration. His assurances
in reply to the King mounted like a ladder to Heaven. He had
accepted election only to end the “damnable schism,” and would
rather spend the rest of his life in “desert or cloister” than prolong
it; if the King sent well-informed persons with denite proposals, he
would accept them without hesitation and “execute them without
fail”; he was “disposed, determined and resolved” to work for union
and would accept the counsel of the King and his uncles “so that

they rather than another prince may acquire the eternal glory that
shall be the reward of so meritorious an eort.”
De Luna may have been sincere but once he was on the papal
throne, the duty to abdicate was fast replaced by the sense of right
that supreme oce breeds. The schism, like the war, was a trap not
easy to get out of.
All this time Coucy had been in north Italy conducting, on behalf
of Louis d’Orléans, a nancial, political, and military campaign for
the sovereignty of Genoa. The oer had come out of the city’s
chronic anarchy: the Grimaldi, Doria, Spinola, and other noble
families, having been exiled and lacking cohesion, wanted a
sovereign to restore them and deliver the city from bourgeois rule.
Power swung from one bourgeois group to another, each of which
installed a Doge until he was overthrown and exiled by opponents.
No fewer than ve Doges held oce in 1393, giving way in 1394 to
the return of Adorno, the Doge of the Tunisian campaign. Doges,
parties, and exiled nobles exerted their various weights in the
uctuating balance of power between Florence and Milan.
As Lieutenant and Procurator General “in trans-alpine parts” for
the Duc d’Orléans, Coucy established himself at Asti, which
belonged to Louis as part of Valentina’s dowry. He commanded
some 400 lances and 230 archers recruited from among the best in
France, and engaged an almost equal number of Gascon and Italian
mercenaries. But without greatly superior numbers he could not
expect to subdue Genoese territories by military conquest alone, if
the local rulers were disposed to defend them. As in Normandy
many years before, his strategy was to take castles and towns by
negotiation backed by a show of force and assault only when
required.
The nobles who had made the original proposal came to oer him
their castles, but, being “prudent and subtle” and having experience
of Lombards and Genoese, Coucy did not trust too much in their
promises and took care not to put himself in their power, even to
the point of holding conferences in open elds rather than inside

castle premises. Collaboration with the Genoese in Tunisia must
have left an unpleasant impression.
Guided by Gian Galeazzo, who arranged contacts and lent money
and soldiers, Coucy pushed his way through the Italian maze,
recruiting and paying mercenary companies, negotiating the terms
and price for submission of castles and territories, treating with Pisa
and Lucca for their non-interference, sending out envoys to other
parts of Italy to gather adhesions for the future Kingdom of Adria.
The paper work was substantial, and through its survival in the
archives a 14th century politico-military campaign can be seen at
work. Recruiting was piecemeal: Guedon de Foissac comes with 2
knights, 19 squires, and 10 archers, Aimé de Miribel with 26 men-
at-arms, Hennequin Wautre with 16 archers. Six Italian companies
range in size from 10 to 350 “cavaliers.” Bonnerel de Grimaut
(probably Grimaldi) receives 100 gold orins for “showing the ways
and means” by which the enterprise of Savona can be accomplished.
Jerome de Balart, doctor of laws, and Luquin Mourre, squire,
receive 100 gold orins for advice in the same project.
The territory of Savona, which had revolted against the Doge, is
the crux of the advance, requiring delicate negotiations. When
Gascon mercenaries are about to subject one of its vassal towns to
“re and blood” in revenge for the killing of three of their horses,
they have to be hastily bought o at a cost of 96 écus, not too much
to avoid hostilities which would make the cost of conquest greater.
The approaches to Savona are opened by deals with surrounding
lords for permission to pass through the valleys they command.
Finally, Savona with its towns and castles is secured by “secret
treaties” and payment of 6,990 gold orins.
Each castle whose allegiance is obtained is required to y the
Orléans ag and each lord is reimbursed by monthly installments on
an agreed sum “until such time as the Duc d’Orléans is made master
of Genoa.” Forty members of the Spinola family receive collectively
1,400 orins a month for their allegiance and agreement to billet
Coucy’s forces in their towns and fortresses. Records of each
transaction in the precise and architectural handwriting of the time

make it plain that when knighthood was in ower, one of its
primary interests was money.
The notaries who drew up these agreements and the ambassadors
who conrmed them had to be paid, as well as couriers to and from
Paris. Wages to men-at-arms and retainers to captains of companies
were recorded, likewise twenty orins to Antonio de Cove,
cannoneer, to fetch a grosse bombarde from a certain lord for the
siege of a castle; eighteen orins to an envoy sent by Coucy to Pavia
to borrow 400 orins from Gian Galeazzo; a silver goblet and ewer
to Gian Galeazzo’s secretary.
Not surprisingly, Coucy was constantly running out of ready cash,
but the banking and credit network of the time kept him in
operation. It enabled him to borrow 12,000 orins from one
Boroumeus de Boroumeis, merchant of Milan, to be repaid by
Orléans to the brothers Jacques and Franchequin Jouen, merchant-
grocers of Paris. At another time Coucy pawned jewels and plate to
pay his men-at-arms until 40,000 livres were brought by Orléans’
chamberlain from Paris.
In November, after receiving plenipotentiary powers from the
King of France and the Duc d’Orléans, Coucy concluded a treaty
with Savona covering a mass of rights, guarantees, and obligations
almost as complex as the Treaty of Brétigny. With this in hand, he
moved to Pavia to arrange the denitive terms of Gian Galeazzo’s
share in the present venture and in the future Voie de Fait.
Twenty-one years had passed since Coucy and Gian Galeazzo had
fought on opposite sides in the Battle of Montichiari. Did they
reminisce over old times and remind each other how each had
barely escaped with his life? Or were their relations purely formal?
Did they compare notes on their respective monastic foundations,
Coucy’s for the Célestins at Soissons, Gian Galeazzo’s for the
Carthusians at Pavia, and did the Italian Prince say, as he had
elsewhere, that he intended to build one “which will have no like in
the world”? He did not live to see his boast fullled in the famous
Certosa of Pavia.
He would doubtless have conducted Coucy through his archive of
state papers and certainly through his library, whose collection had

been started for his father by Petrarch. It contained the poet’s copy
of Vergil as well as his own and Boccaccio’s works and Dante’s
Commedia. Steadily expanded by Gian Galeazzo’s purchases to more
than 900 volumes, it rivaled the library of Charles V at the Louvre
and was open to bibliophiles and scholars whom the lord of Pavia
liked to attract to his court. Its glories were the illuminated
manuscripts he commissioned. Regardless of text, which might be
Pliny or Horace, they illustrated the contemporary world in plants
and animals, medical procedures, wedding processions, ships,
castles, battles, banquets, and, not least, in the supreme Visconti
Hours, in three portraits of Gian Galeazzo himself. The artist,
Giovanni dei Grassi, surrounded by his pots of pigment and precious
gold leaf, was at work on the Hours in the year of Coucy’s visit.
Undoubtedly Coucy would have seen the rising construction of
the Milan Cathedral, of which his host had laid the foundations in
1386 in pious gratitude for his successful ouster of the impious
Bernabò. While Gian Galeazzo gave a monthly subsidy of 500
orins, the building was a product of the popular will, pursued with
an impulse so vigorous that the pillars of the nave were already
completed. Participation and funds came from all classes. The Guild
of Armorers came in a body to begin the work of carrying away
rubble in baskets. Not to be outdone, the Drapers followed, then the
College of Notaries, government ocials, nobles, and others in a
steady stream of voluntary labor. Districts of the city vied with each
other in contributions. When the Porta Orientale gave an ass worth
fty lire and a day’s work on the excavations, the Porta Vercellina
gave a calf worth 150 lire. In the record of donations the whole of
society appears: consecutive entries list three lire, four soldi from
“Raalda, prostitute,” and 160 lire from the secretary of Valentina
dei Visconti, Duchesa d’Orléans.
Coucy concluded two treaties with the lord of Milan, one
providing for a joint force to take Genoa, the other concerning the
Voie de Fait. In the second treaty Visconti undertook to provide a
certain number of lances if the King of France came to Italy in
person, and a more limited number if the leader were Orléans or—
which was hardly likely—the Duke of Burgundy.

The reason for the reference to Burgundy remains hidden in the
enigmatic statecraft of Gian Galeazzo. He was a ruler who always
played both sides in pursuit of his goal and was prepared to
abandon one for the other when necessary. In his need of an ally
against Florence and Bologna, he could see that France, with an
unstable King and a struggle between uncle and nephew for control
of policy, was a shifting proposition, and the Voie de Fait, since the
death of Clement, a fading prospect. While negotiating with Coucy,
he was already mending relations with his technical overlord, the
Emperor Wenceslas, who, like himself, needed support against
domestic enemies. To conrm his imperial title, Wenceslas would
have to undertake that hazard of emperors, the journey to Rome for
formal coronation by the Pope. Visconti wealth would make it
possible. In exchange for 100,000 orins in 1395, Wenceslas sold
Gian Galeazzo the title of hereditary Duke of Milan with sovereignty
over 25 cities. As the rst such title in Italy, it marked the line
where the age of city-states passed into the age of despots. It did not
help Wenceslas, who was charged by his opponents with illegally
alienating imperial territory and was ultimately deposed before ever
becoming secure enough to make the journey to Italy.
While Coucy pushed forward the campaign against Genoa,
another deal was arranged behind his back. A coalition of Florence,
Burgundy, and Queen Isabeau induced Doge Adorno, as a means of
keeping himself in oce, to oer the sovereignty of Genoa to
Charles VI, eectively thwarting Orléans and Visconti. On the edge
of renewed madness in 1395, Charles could be manipulated. In the
“grievous March” of that year, on being informed that the King had
bought out Louis’ interests in Genoa for 300,000 francs, Coucy
discovered himself acting for a dierent principal. On the crown’s
instructions, he now negotiated a truce with the Doge Adorno, who
promptly broke it by laying siege to regain Savona. In the course of
the defense Coucy was immobilized for four days in July by a
“wounded leg,” which may have been a fresh injury or an eect of
the old injury suered ten years before. He can be glimpsed only
intermittently in the documents, like a patch of sky through moving
clouds.

By August the siege of Savona was raised, the sovereignty of
Genoa conrmed in the King of France, and Coucy’s campaign
brought to an end. He is last seen with a suite of 120 horsemen
leaving Asti on October 13 and reaching Turin the same evening on
his way to yet another crossing of the Alps. On his return to France,
Louis welcomed him with a gift—or a payment—of 10,000 francs
“to help him over all he had suered in Italy.” In fact Coucy had
gained for the crown of France, if not for the Duc d’Orléans, the
long-sought foothold in Italy. French rule of Genoa was formally
established in the following year. Overthrown by a popular uprising
in 1409, it left a claim which Charles’s and Louis’ descendants,
Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, were still pursuing into the
16th century.
While Coucy was engaged against Genoa, court and University
coalesced in a concerted eort to unseat Benedict XIII. Although
they knew him well, the French were oended by the election of a
Spaniard, and he, though nobly born, did not have the kinship with
Valois, Bourbons, and Counts of Savoy which had made Clement,
from the French point of view, “one of us.” An end to the schism
became the more imperative as the tocsin for crusade rang more
insistently. Hungarian ambassadors were on their way to France; the
Patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria had already arrived with a
tale of woe.
Just as the humble Archbishop of Bari turned into a bully
overnight as Urban VI, so the subtle and diplomatic Pedro de Luna
turned righteous and inexible as Benedict XIII. A heart-rending
plea by the University not to put o “for a day, an hour, an instant”
his intention to abdicate left Benedict unmoved, although the
rhetoric of which Clamanges was again the author would have
penetrated a conscience of granite. By resigning he would gain,
wrote the University, “eternal honor, imperishable renown, a chorus
of universal praise and immortal glory.” If he postponed by one day,
a second would follow, then a third. His spirit will weaken,
atterers and place-seekers will come with sweet words and gifts;

under the mask of friendship, “they will poison your mind with fear
of evil consequences and cool your zeal for this noble and dicult
enterprise.” The sweetness of honors and power will take hold. “If
you are ready today, why wait until tomorrow? If you are not ready
today, you will be less so tomorrow.” The peace and health of the
Church are in his hands. Should his rival refuse to abdicate when
Benedict does, he will have condemned himself as “the most
perverse schismatic,” and proved to all Catholics the necessity of
ousting him.
Unilateral abdication did not appeal to Benedict, nor was he
persuaded that its moral eect could dislodge his rival. When
Chancellor d’Ailly and his ardent and vocal colleague Gilles
Deschamps came to Avignon as the King’s ambassadors to add
pressure, they found that the former De Luna’s easy promise of
taking o his hat had given way to a Spanish stubbornness bred “in
the country of good mules.”
Pressure was augmented in Paris. In February 1395 a conference
of 109 prelates and learned clerics was convened in the King’s name
to decide on how to end the schism. After two weeks’ deliberation,
attended by archbishops, bishops, abbés, and doctors of theology, it
voted 87 to 22 for the Way to Cession and renunciation of the Way
of Force. Not entirely a matter of conviction, the vote reected the
ascendancy of the Duke of Burgundy. Prelates and theologians
dependent for place on the patronage of one or another of the royal
Dukes watched carefully the trend of events. Accordingly, as
Burgundy or Orléans rose in power—usually Burgundy when the
King was mad and Orléans when he was sane—their attitudes
shifted, preventing a coherent policy.
The majority of the conference now renounced the Voie de Fait. It
was declared “too perilous” and likely to involve the King of France
in wars against all those obedient to the “Intruder” in Rome. Even if
Boniface were defeated, said the prelates, the nations of England,
Italy, Germany, and Hungary would still not accept Benedict XIII
and “the schism would be stronger than it is now.” The only hope
was for Benedict to put his abdication in the hands of the King of
France, who would then call upon his fellow sovereigns of the other

obedience to obtain that of Boniface likewise. Despite the obvious
aws in this procedure, a decision for cession was clearly what the
crown wanted. Without a French Pope as its beneciary, the Way of
Force had lost its attraction.
Adria and conquest of the Papal States vanished with the Voie de
Fait, and with it any prospect for Benedict of ousting his rival by
force of French arms. To convince him of this, the crown dispatched
the most imposing embassy ever sent to Avignon, consisting of all
three royal Dukes—Burgundy, Berry, and Orléans—supported by ten
delegates of the University. Though softened by splendid gifts of
Burgundian wines and Flemish tapestries, the message was a
conscious assertion of royal will over the Church. It met an
opponent unsurpassed in the techniques of evasion.
The issue was debated in polished discourse at a series of
audiences, each opening on an appropriate text, with the usual
“owers of rhetoric” and many canonical and historical citations by
each side. As a former professor at Montpellier, Benedict was not to
be put down by the academics from Paris. While continually
reasserting his willingness to work until death for union, he refused
to be cornered into abdicating without a bilateral guarantee. Since
here was the glaring weakness of the French case, he may have
suspected that the French wanted him out mainly in order to install
a French Pope in his place—and he may have been right. He twisted
and evaded as the hunters pursued. When they demanded to see the
text of the oath signed by the cardinals in conclave, he rst refused,
then oered to tell the substance in secret, then, when further
pressed, to read it aloud without handing it over. When that too was
rejected, he claimed a kind of executive privilege on the ground that
resolutions of the conclave could not be communicated to anyone.
Forced to yield, he proposes a joint conference of both popes and
both sets of cardinals. The visitors say this is impossible because of
the Intruder’s obstinacy, and that Benedict’s voluntary cession is
what is wanted. He asks for the proposal in writing. Gilles
Deschamps replies that that is not necessary since it consists of but
one word of two syllables: “cession.” The Pope asks for time to
reect. During the pause, Burgundy invites the cardinals to give him

their opinion “in good conscience as private persons, not as
members of the Sacred College.” They favor cession nineteen to one,
the lone opponent being the Cardinal of Pampeluna, another
Spaniard. When the cardinals put their opinion in writing, Benedict
forbids them to sign the document. At an audience from which he
excludes the University delegates he informs the Dukes that if they
will support him, he will abandon to them the conquest and
possession of the Papal States. They are deaf to the proposal.
The discussions have now lasted for two months, with the visitors
coming across the river every day from Villeneuve, where they are
staying. They discover one morning that during the night someone
has burned the famous bridge by setting re to boats moored to the
piles. At once fearing “treason” and attack, they seize arms, but on
second thought suspect the Pope. If the Spaniard is laughing on the
other bank, it is privately. Swearing he has had nothing to do with
the re, he sends workmen to repair the bridge and arrange a
temporary pontoon of boats tied together, hardly suitable for proud
Dukes to ride across in dignity. The only alternative is crossing by
boat, which is slow and insecure against the rushing waters.
Disgusted, the visitors after consultation with the cardinals decide
on one last appeal, which Benedict, still arming his devotion to
union, rejects. Defeated, the French depart after three months of
empty eort. The schism remains unresolved.
With no assurance that his abdication would end the schism,
Benedict cannot bear all the blame. Astonishingly, he won a
champion in Nicolas de Clamanges, who had so furiously prophesied
doom if the popes postponed abdication by a single day. In a
decision which caused a storm at the University he now accepted
oce as Benedict’s secretary, and was later to write of him that
“though gravely accused, he was great and laudable and I believe
him to have been a saintly man nor do I know anyone more
praiseworthy.” Did Nicolas act from conviction or was he bought?
Since his motives are lost to us, let us believe them sincere.
Outraged by the outcome of its eorts, all the more because
Benedict’s original words had nourished high hopes, the University
proposed two radical measures: it advised the King to withhold from

Benedict the ecclesiastical revenues of France, a step amounting to a
break with Avignon; and it advised the cardinals that if Benedict
continued to refuse cession, he should be deposed by a General
Council. The crown was not yet prepared to withhold obedience,
though it was to come to that stage three years later. Fourteen years
were to pass before Europe could achieve the momentary unity for a
General Council, which even then did not succeed.
The University kept up its campaign. Letters went to rulers and
other universities urging them to insist on cession by both popes.
Doctors of Theology journeyed forth on horseback to preach in
towns and provinces against the evils of the schism. In the course of
denouncing the corruptions of the Church, they spread—with results
they may not have intended—the demand for reform. The French
crown sent envoys to the King of England and princes of Germany
urging the way of mutual cession, and received everyone’s earnest
concurrence with as yet little practical result. Benedict XIII resisted
every pressure. For nearly thirty years to come, despite French
withdrawal of obedience, siege of Avignon, desertion by his
cardinals, deposition by two Councils, and the rivalry of three other
popes, he would not step down. Retreating to a Spanish fortress, he
died in 1422 at the age of 94 still maintaining his claim.
Unexpectedly, the war, if not the schism, gave promise of ending
at last. In March 1395, Richard II proposed a marriage between
himself and Isabelle, daughter of the King of France. He was 29
years old, she six. As a way of by-passing the unyielding disputes to
gain peace by other means, it was a bold move, even if peace was
not its only motive.
Richard II had no use for what he termed this “intolerable war,”
nor did he share the animosity for France it had bred in most
Englishmen. On the contrary, he admired France, desired to meet
her King, and wanted peace in order to strengthen himself against
his domestic opponents. He had ruled constitutionally for seven
years since his rough treatment by the Lords Appellant, but his
autocratic nature, intensied by that humiliation, craved absolute

monarchy and the subjection of his enemies. Kingship, which can
corrupt or improve, seems to have had a generally one-sided eect
in the 14th century: only Charles V gained wisdom from
responsibility. Richard was moody, proigate, despotic, emotional,
and temperamentally if not physically aggressive. When his wife,
Anne of Bohemia, sister of Wenceslas, died in 1394, he indulged the
passion of his grief by ordering the royal manor of Sheen to be
destroyed because she had died there. At her funeral, believing
himself insulted by the behavior of the Earl of Arundel, one of the
Lords Appellant, the King seized a sta and struck him to the
ground.
Anne had been a sweet-natured woman of his own age who
inspired, unlike her unhappy brother, only the most benign
comments in the chronicles. Her death may have loosened some
restraining inuence, besides leaving Richard without a direct heir.
To ensure his line, a second marriage was advisable, but the choice
of a six-year-old child who was expressly spared consummation of
the marriage until she was twelve suggests that an heir was not
Richard’s primary object. He wanted reconciliation with France in
order to close o opportunities to the “boars” of England and, quite
specically, to gain French support, if need be, against them. His
envoys were instructed to obtain assurance from the French King
and from his uncles and brother “to aid and sustain Richard with all
their power against any of his subjects.”
That was hardly a normal request by one King of another,
especially one so lately and still technically his enemy. Richard was
only two years away from his grasp at absolute monarchy, the
murder of Gloucester, the execution of Arundel, the banishment of
Norfolk and Henry of Lancaster, and the series of compulsive
provocations which in two more years were to lose him his crown
and nally his life. Modern historians have suggested that in his last
years he was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern
view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to
inhibit impulse.
Richard was King in a time of increasing tensions, suppressed but
not eased since the Peasants’ Revolt. Lawless bands of marauding

knights and archers still spread disorder, heavy taxes were a
constant complaint, Lollardy, despite the eorts to stamp it out,
ickered everywhere. Its social no less than religious threat united
crown and Church against it: the days of John of Gaunt’s alliance
with Wyclif were gone, although Lollards appeared in high places.
During the Parliament of 1394–95 the movement suddenly surfaced
with an inammatory public statement of twelve “conclusions and
truths for the reformation of Holy Church in England.”
Supported by several members of the House of Commons,
including the ever troublesome Sir Richard Stury and another knight
who were both members of the Privy Council, a petition for the
twelve reforms, written in English, was presented as a bill to
Parliament. Simultaneously it was pinned in public view on the
doors of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. The Twelve Conclusions
were a mirror of the late medieval Church as seen by the
dissatised; by those who wanted to believe and have faith but felt
blocked by encrusted materialism and idolatry. They were the
conclusions Wyclif had reached one by one, beginning with the two
most threatening to Church and priesthood: temporal disendowment
and denial of the “supposed miracle” of transubstantiation. Other
rituals denounced in the list were vows of chastity, which in priests
encouraged vice, and in women, who were “by nature frail and
imperfect,” led to many horrible sins; consecration or exorcism of
physical objects, which was nothing but “jugglery,” akin to
necromancy; and pilgrimages to deaf images of wood and stone,
which were a form of idolatry. The Tenth Conclusion was new—a
virtual denial of the right to kill. It asserted that manslaughter in
battle or by court of justice for any temporal cause was expressly
contrary to the New Testament.
So alarmed were the bishops by the Twelve Conclusions that they
summoned Richard home from Ireland, where he then was, to
decree new measures of suppression. The King himself, in fury at the
heresy, threatened to kill Sir Richard Stury “by the foulest death
that may be” if he ever broke the oath to recant that was forced
upon him. The Twelve Conclusions, however, were beyond the
sovereign’s power to kill. Lollardy had already found a response in

Queen Anne’s Bohemian retinue and through them formed a
connection between the ideas of Wyclif and Jan Hus.
Richard’s proposal of marriage, broached before the French Dukes
went to Avignon, was not unanimously welcomed. Philippe de
Mézières was its ardent advocate in the interests of crusade, as was
the Duke of Burgundy in the interests of commerce. But the hostility
of half a century was not easily dissipated. Berry and Orléans were
both opposed, and when the proposal was debated in the French
Council, several members objected on the ground that a marriage
without a peace was unnatural. Coucy, if he had not been absent in
Italy, might have shared that attitude. An incident of the same year
shows him leaning over backward—perhaps because of his special
connections—to maintain the formal relationship between enemies,
even during a period of truce. Asked by Froissart, who was
preparing to visit England, for letters of introduction to Richard and
his uncles, Coucy refused “because he was a Frenchman” to write to
the King, although he gave Froissart a letter to his daughter
Philippa. If a letter to the King of England was impolitic, marriage
to the King of England must indeed have appeared radical.
In the Council, Arnaud de Corbie, the Chancellor, advised
acceptance on the ground that the marriage bond would strengthen
the English King against the war party in his own country. The
interests of peace prevailed. In July, 1,200 French gentlemen
escorted a formal English embassy led by Earl Marshal Nottingham
to the Council table in Paris. Agreement was reached on a dowry for
Isabelle of 800,000 francs but no lands, and on a truce of 28 years.
For the rst time, a truce was long enough to represent a genuine
forswearing of belligerent will—at least on the part of the
negotiators. That was the diculty.
If the French on whose soil the war was fought had, on the whole,
had enough, too many English, personied in the Duke of
Gloucester, had not. They were galled by a sense of having been
bilked out of the gains conrmed in the Treaty of Brétigny. They
ached to get satisfaction and saw the marriage putting it o forever.
Footloose knights and yeomen were still attracted by the warring
way of life and its loot on the continent. The commons, suering

from disrupted commerce and oppressive taxes, may have wanted
peace, but they did not like the French marriage. They feared
Richard would give away too much to the French; there were
mutterings about Calais, and disappointment if not suspicion at the
choice of a child queen and continued uncertainty about an heir.
Because of Gloucester’s inuence and popularity with the
Londoners, Richard did not dare to conclude the alliance without his
concurrence and that of his party. More than a year elapsed in the
eort to obtain it. The French sent Robert the Hermit to add the
weight of Heaven’s command for peace, and to impress upon the
English the Turkish menace which the Hermit knew from his travels
in Syria. A visionary, even if he traveled with seven horses at the
expense of the French King, was not the best choice to inuence
Gloucester. When, at the climax of his peroration, the Hermit
warned, “Surely, whoever is or will be against the peace shall pay
dearly for it be he alive or dead,” Gloucester pulled him up with a
sharp, “How do you know that?” Robert could only answer by
“divine inspiration,” which left the Duke unimpressed. He remained
“hard-hearted against the peace,” and by his words “condemned and
despised greatly the Frenchmen.”
Richard worriedly told Count Waleran de St. Pol, who had
accompanied the Hermit, that Gloucester was trying to inuence the
people against a peace, perhaps even to “raise the people against
me, which is a great peril.” St. Pol, the hard-headed brother of
saintly Pierre de Luxemburg, advised the King to win his uncle with
fair words and great gifts until the marriage and peace were
concluded. Then he could “take other counsel,” because then he
would be strong enough to “oppress all rebels, for the French King if
need be shall aid you; of this you may be sure.” The lubricator of
politics was the same then as before and since. Richard promised
Gloucester £100,000 and an earldom for his son worth £2,000 a
year (which he later failed to make good) and, by various
persuasions and pressures brought to bear by the Duke of Lancaster,
secured a sullen acquiescence.
A proxy marriage and ratication of the truce were celebrated in
Paris in March 1396, with Nottingham acting as proxy for the King.

Nottingham now had occasion to meet the object of his esteem in
entertainment if not in combat, for Coucy was one of those who
acted as host to the English ambassadors during their three-week
stay in the capital. After endorsement of the marriage contract by
the barons of England, Richard himself went to Calais in August,
where in conferences with the Duke of Burgundy he went far to
show himself a friend of France. He agreed to support the Way of
Cession and persuade the Pope of Rome to resign, and, more
realistically, he agreed to yield English footholds in Brittany. He
went home again to make known the articles of peace to his
countrymen, for he said he “could not rmly conclude a peace
without the general consent of the people of England.”
He returned in October for the climactic meeting with the King of
France, held with all appropriate magnicence in a eld of bright
pavilions on the borders of Calais. Between two lines of 400 French
knights and 400 English knights “with their swords in their hands,”
the two Kings advanced toward each other, each escorted by the
uncles of the other. As they met and embraced, all 800 knights
knelt, many weeping with emotion. Meetings, banquets, and
merriment followed. The seven-year-old bride, swamped in scarlet
velvet and emeralds, was handed over and formally married to
Richard in November at Calais by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Enguerrand de Coucy was not present at the ceremonies nor to meet
his daughter Philippa, who was in the English party, for he had
already departed with the chief knights and nobles of the realm on
the last crusade of any consequence in the Middle Ages.
The Kings were at peace, but all the old issues—disputed frontiers
and territories, homages and reparations, Guienne and Calais—
remained unresolved, and Gloucester’s rancor abided. The French
found that all the honors and entertainments and gifts of gold and
silver they heaped on him in an eort to soften his antagonism went
for nothing. He took the gifts and remained cold, hard, and covert in
his answers. “We waste our eort on this Duke of Gloucester,”
Burgundy said to his council, “for as long as he lives there shall
surely be no peace between France and England. He will always nd
new inventions and accidents to engender hatred and the strife

between the realms.” It did not take Gloucester, who would be dead
within a year, to nd these. Burgundy himself, through the
fratricidal strife with Orléans carried on by his son, was as
responsible as any. And the unending war had cut a gulf too deep to
be easily pasted over. In England, Richard and Lancaster were the
only genuine supporters of a pro-French policy, and both were dead
three years after the French marriage. Animosity toward France
endured. Not quite twenty years after the reconciliation, Henry V
was to call to his followers, “Once more unto the breach!”

Chapter 26

F
Nicopolis
or fty years Europeans had heard, more or less inattentively,
the distant crash of the Turks’ penetration in the East and the
cries of distress marking their relentless advance. The
Ottoman Turks were the last and destined to be the most
enduring wave of warrior nomads who during the 11th to 13th
centuries had swept out of the Asian steppes to overwhelm Asia
Minor, as the Goths and Huns before them had overwhelmed Rome.
Originally, the Ottomans had settled on the shores of the Black Sea
in Anatolia as vassals of the preceding Seljuk Turks and guardians of
the Seljuk frontier. When the Seljuk empire crumbled under the
Mongol invasions of Genghis Khan and his successors, the trained,
hard-ghting bands of the border chief Osman (whence the name
Ottoman) declared their independence of Seljuk rule in 1300, and
rose on the ruins of their predecessors. In 25 years, with all the
brutal energy of a people on the way up, they conquered key cities
and large tracts of Anatolia and mastered the shores of the thin blue
straits separating Asia from Europe.
Across the straits on the European side stood Constantinople,
capital of what was left of the Byzantine Empire. This eastern relic
of the ancient Roman Empire was now nally disintegrating 800
years after Rome had succumbed to the earlier barbarians. Pushed
back into Europe, it was a shrunken remnant of former greatness, its
naval and commercial supremacy lost to Genoese and Venetians, its
structure weakened by the same processes at work in the West—
feudal service inadequately replaced by a money economy, Black
Death, economic disruptions, religious dissent, workers’ uprisings,
warring peoples. Serbs and Bulgars, developing their own kingdoms,
assaulted it on the west and a variety of small powers harassed it in
the Aegean. Its provinces were disorganized, its military force

dependent on mercenaries, its sovereignty torn apart by ferocious
feuds around the throne. These feuds provided the opening through
which the Ottoman Turks entered Europe.
The feuds began with the pretensions of John Cantacuzene, who
as chief minister bore the title the “Great Domestic” and served as
regent for John V Paleologus, child heir to the throne. In 1341
Cantacuzene declared himself joint—in reality, rival—Emperor as
John VI. Through ensuing years of civil war he maintained his hold
by purchasing the services of the hardy, disciplined Ottoman forces.
When, at Cantacuzene’s invitation, Sultan Orchan crossed the
Hellespont in 1345, it was, in Gibbon’s knell, “the last and fatal
stroke” in the long fall of the ancient Roman Empire.
Murad I, Orchan’s successor, gained a foothold on the European
side with the capture in 1353 of Gallipoli, key to the Hellespont.
Exactly 100 years later the Turks were to take Constantinople itself,
but Cantacuzene, like other great actors in history, had no vision of
the consequences inherent in his acts. Rather, to cement the
collaboration with his new allies, he gave his daughter in marriage
to Orchan in a Moslem ceremony, bridging the abyss between
Christian and indel without scruple—and without aecting his
faith. Some years later, when forced to abdicate, the once “Great
Domestic” became a monk and retired to write in cloistered calm a
history of the times he had done so much to embroil.
Incurable discord at Constantinople gave the Turks the means to
exploit their gateway at Gallipoli. Upon Cantacuzene’s abdication,
his former ward, John Paleologus, regained the throne (which
accounts for the alarming succession of John VI by John V) only to
plunge into a vicious family struggle in which sons and grandson,
uncle and nephew over the next 35 years deposed, imprisoned,
tortured, and replaced one another in various combinations with
Murad I.
While assisting the Paleologi toward their mutual destruction, the
Turks, like a hand opening out from the wrist at Gallipoli, expanded
through the Byzantine and Bulgarian dominions. In 1365 Murad
advanced his capital to Adrianople (Edirne) 120 miles inside
Europe. In 1371 he defeated a league of Serbs and Bulgars on the

river Maritza in Bulgaria. John V henceforth held part of his empire,
and the Bulgar boyars their territories, as vassals of the Sultan. In
1389 a new league of Serbs, Rumanians, and their northern
neighbors, the Moldavians, attempted to stem the Turks but were
defeated by Murad in the decisive Battle of Kossovo, the grave of
Serbian independence. The Serbian Czar and the elite of his nobles
were killed and his son forced to accept vassalship to the Sultan.
Murad himself was killed after the battle by a dying Serb who,
feigning to have a secret to tell the Sultan, stabbed him in the belly
when Murad leaned over to listen to him. However, the Sultan left
his successor, Bajazet, the strongest power in the region. In the 35
years since their crossing of the Bosporus, the Turks had overrrun
the eastern Balkans up to the Danube and now stood at the borders
of Hungary.
The division of their foes was the major factor in the Turkish
advance. A legacy of bitter mistrust had separated Constantinople
from the West ever since the Latin crusaders had penetrated the
Eastern dominions. The old schism in Christianity between the
Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches left an implacable
dispute over minor matters of ritual—the less fundamental they
were, the greater the rancor—and made adversaries of the Balkan
peoples. Bulgaria and Wallachia (the contemporary name for
Rumania) and most of Serbia belonged to the Greek Church, as
opposed to Hungary, which belonged to the Latin and was resented
for its eorts to impose Roman Catholic clergy and gain political
dominion over its neighbors. Mircea, voyevod or ruler of Wallachia,
fought against the Turks at Kossovo, but, because of old animosities,
was not anxious to make common cause with Hungary against the
common enemy. The same was true of the Serbs, who in any case
were precluded from doing so once they accepted the Sultan as
overlord. This had been Murad’s policy: to neutralize the Balkan
rulers by leaving them in place under the obligation of homage.
Because their kingdoms lacked unity, being no more than loose
federations of semi-autonomous rulers, each could be picked o
individually. One by one, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Serbian, and
Wallachian rulers paid homage in order to avoid continuous Turkish

raids. In areas of direct conquest, Murad divided the territory as
efs among his followers, rooting them in Europe. Half the Turkish
army at Kossovo already held land on the far side of the Bosporus.
Bajazet lost none of the impetus of his forebears. Chosen Sultan
on the battleeld of Kossovo, he began by strangling his brother
with a bowstring, a customary Turkish precaution, and proceeded at
once to the business of shaking the Byzantine throne by assisting
John VII to overthrow his grandfather. When John was in turn
overthrown by his uncle, Manuel II, Bajazet besieged and blockaded
Constantinople for seven years. In the meantime, he expanded his
hold in Bulgaria, invaded Macedonia and Attica, and ravaged Bosnia
and Croatia—taking more prisoners, it was said, than he left
inhabitants. He was bold, enterprising, always on horseback,
“equally avid for the blood of his enemies as he was prodigal with
that of his soldiers.” His vanguard of ghazis, instruments of Allah,
fought with the extra zeal of holy war against the Christian indels.
A ghazi, according to Turkish denition, was “the sword of God who
puries the earth from the lth of polytheism,” by which was meant
the Christian Trinity.
In 1393, after occupying Tirnovo, capital of the eastern Bulgarian
kingdom, Bajazet captured Nicopolis, the strongest Bulgarian
fortress on the Danube. Situated on a height above the town of
Nicopolis on the river’s edge, it commanded what was then a ford of
the Danube protected by a Wallachian fortress on the opposite bank.
Two tributary rivers entered the Danube at the base of the castle
which thus controlled communications through the interior as well
as down the Danube. At this strategic site the European-Ottoman
clash was to come.
When the Bulgarian Czar, Ivan Shishman, refused, though a
vassal, to support the Turks’ further advance with troops and
provisions, Bajazet imprisoned him in Nicopolis. Growing impatient
with the vassalage system, the Sultan subsequently had his prisoner
strangled, reduced his kingdom to the status of a Turkish sandjak or
province, and moved on against Vidin, capital of the western
Bulgarian kingdom. When Sigismund, King of Hungary, sent envoys
to demand by what right the Sultan abrogated Bulgarian

sovereignty, Bajazet answered without words by simply pointing to
the weapons and war trophies that hung upon his walls. Behind him
he constructed a huge tower to fortify Gallipoli and a permanent
port for his galleys. He raised imposing mosques at Adrianople and
built caravansaries along the path of his advance. While his armed
horsemen thrust forward in Europe, he continued to campaign and
extend his hold in Anatolia. For the “ery energy of his soul” and
the speed of his marches, he earned the surname Ilderim, meaning
Thunderbolt.
Following the capture of Nicopolis, King Sigismund’s appeals to
the West for help grew more pressing. His country was now the last
organized state in Eastern Europe resisting the Turks and it still
remembered the terror of the Mongol ravages that had swept and
receded over the Danube plain in the last century. Though Hungary
was “Queen of the surrounding countries,” the resistance she could
oer to the new invaders was hampered by incessant quarrels with
Poland and Lithuania on the north, by the hostility of her neighbors
to the south, and by divisions within its own ruling class and among
its commoners. The country was a patchwork made up of a foreign
sovereign, Hungarian nobles, native peasants living by an
agriculture untouched by the West, and a merchant class of German
immigrants who had developed the towns and remained alien in
habit as they did in Bohemia and Poland.
Through a century of rule by the Angevin dynasty, the Hungarian
crown was closely connected with the French court and continued
to be so under the Luxemburg dynasty, which began with
Sigismund. He became King in 1387 by virtue of marriage to the
daughter of the last Angevin King, Louis the Great, who died
without a male heir. Son of the late Emperor Charles IV and
younger half-brother of Wenceslas, Sigismund was a less serious
statesman than his father, more able and sensible than his distracted
brother. Like Wenceslas, he was well educated and uent in four
languages. Tall, strong, and uncommonly handsome, with light-
brown hair worn long and curled, he was intelligent and well-
meaning as a ruler but pleasure-loving, extravagant, and licentious,
with a record of scandalous love aairs. History knows him largely

as Emperor in later life, but at this time he was only 28 and barely
keeping his balance in precarious circumstances.
Succeeding as an outsider to the Hungarian crown at nineteen, he
had faced comparison with a dynamic and powerful predecessor, the
enmity of rebellious nobles, a domineering mother-in-law, and a
rival to the throne in the person of that throne-surfeited Angevin
heir, Charles of Durazzo. Through hectic years of cabals and
assassinations, Charles of Durazzo and Queen-Mother Elizabeth of
Hungary managed to destroy each other, and the rebellious nobles
were more or less contained, despite such intensity of feeling as
caused one of them to shout at Sigismund, “I will never bow to you,
you Bohemian pig!” Preoccupied by these various challenges in his
rst eight years as ruler, Sigismund was not able to mobilize
eective resistance to the Turks, who took advantage of the
situation to ravage his borders.
Personally brave though tactless, hot-tempered and cruel when
angered, Sigismund had survived. Like each of the Luxemburgs, he
had distinctive characteristics. On being shown a relic said to be a
bone of St. Elizabeth, he turned it over and remarked that it could
just as well be that of a dead cobbler. Attending the Parlement at
Paris to observe the courts of justice in operation, he heard a verdict
given against a plebeian plainti named Seignet on the ground that
he was no knight while the defendant was. To the astonishment of
his retinue and assembled lawyers, judges, and onlookers,
Sigismund rose, announced in a loud voice his right to make
knights, summoned Seignet to him, bade him kneel, and dubbed
him knight on the spot. Removing one of his gold spurs and his belt
from which hung a dagger to represent a sword, he had one of his
men put these insignia on the dumbfounded new knight, and “thus
the King advanced the cause of the said Seignet.”
While not oblivious to the Turkish advance, the West, having no
great attachment to Constantinople, paid little serious attention to
the danger until it reached Hungary. Every Pope in the last forty
years had, it is true, called for crusade against the approaching
indel, some with real fervor, but the fervor was more for
invigoration of the Faith than from a realistic appreciation of the

danger. Such enterprises as were launched against the Turks were
narrow in scope and motivated by special interests. The interest of
the popes was to re-absorb the Eastern Church within the Latin fold;
the interest of the Venetians and Genoese was to preserve their
trading posts in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean; the
interest of the Lusignans of Cyprus was to preserve their kingdom
against the Turkish tide. The nearest thing to a united eort was the
Latin League organized by Pope Clement VI in 1344, even before the
Turks entered Europe. With the combined forces of the papacy,
Venice, Cyprus, and the Hospitalers of Rhodes, Clement had hoped,
by initial success against the Turks, to induce Constantinople to
enter into alliance with the Latin League and reunite with the
Roman Church. Victorious at the outset, the Latin eet took Smyrna
and destroyed 100 Turkish vessels, but the crusaders’ land forces,
paralyzed by disease, dissension, and irresolute leadership, made no
headway and the campaign petered out in negotiated terms.
One further eort was made in the 1360s under the prodding of
Pierre de Lusignan of Cyprus, whose interest was most immediate.
After vainly touring the courts of Europe for three years trying to
raise the forces for a crusade, he was able to mount an expedition
from Cyprus in 1365 which triumphantly took the rich city of
Alexandria in Egypt as a rst step on the way to Jerusalem. Wishing
to make sure of their immense booty, his followers insisted on
sailing away with their gains, leaving Lusignan without enough
forces to exploit his victory, or even hold it. Alexandria had to be
given up.
At the same time, Amadeus of Savoy, whose aunt, Anne of Savoy,
was Dowager Empress in Constantinople, led a remarkable
campaign intending to join up with Lusignan. He succeeded in
regaining Gallipoli, but this too was transitory. The Free Companies
under Du Guesclin, who were supposed to march overland against
the Turks from the West at the same time, never came. Amadeus,
like Lusignan, lacked the forces to go farther, and within a few years
Murad recovered Gallipoli.
In 1369 Constantinople itself called for help. In a desperate eort
to excite the aid of the West, Emperor John V journeyed to Rome to

abjure the schism between the Greek and Latin churches and oer
himself as the rst convert. He succeeded mainly in exciting the fury
of his own clergy and laity, who repudiated his arrangements.
Europe, preoccupied with the renewal of the Anglo-French war, was
not interested.
The one person on record who consistently tried to energize a
response proportionate to the challenge was Philippe de Mézières,
although in his case, too, the enemy was irrelevant: crusade for its
own sake was his great objective. For him it was a moral imperative,
a philosopher’s stone that would cure society’s suering and turn its
evils to gold: quarrels and hostilities would cease, tyrants fall or
reform, Christianity would convert Turks, Tatars, Jews, and
Saracens and bring about the peace and unity of the world. But
though he was an exalté, Mézières knew the Levant and the Turks at
rst hand, with the result that he understood the gravity of the
problem and took it seriously.
As a young cleric drawn by ardor for the Holy Land, he had
joined the crusade of the Latin League to Smyrna; later, as
chancellor to Pierre de Lusignan of Cyprus, he lived close to the
Turkish problem for many years and, on returning to the French
court after Lusignan’s death, made it his purpose in life to regain the
East for Christianity. He recognized that this meant not reckless
adventure, but organized serious warfare to meet an organized,
disciplined foe whom he knew from Smyrna to be well trained,
courageous, and ruthless. He conceived of the force needed as a
national army to include bourgeois and common people serving as
men-at-arms, and knights as leaders, motivated by virtue and zeal
rather than greed. Like the Templars and Hospitalers of old, they
would be dedicated to obedience, justice, and military discipline,
and in the course of their great enterprise would revive the true
ideals of knighthood. He founded, for this purpose, an Order of the
Passion of Jesus Christ. As indicated by the name, his interest was
moral, not military.
Mézières’ insistent propaganda—which included the marvelous
stage spectacle of the First Crusade performed for the Emperor’s
visit to Paris—undoubtedly had its eect on Charles VI and

doubtless on others. In 1389 a rsthand report on the Turks was
brought back by Boucicaut on his return from the Holy Land, where
he had gone to ransom Comte d’Eu on the journey that produced the
Cent Ballades. His recitals of all he had seen in the East, of his visit
to Sigismund in Hungary, and his reception at Gallipoli by Sultan
Murad, who had treated him nobly and given him magnicent gifts
and a safe-conduct, heightened the young King’s desire for the
“glorious adventure.” In the 1390s news from the East grew more
urgent. When the peace parley of 1393 failed to conclude a treaty
with England, Charles nevertheless urged Lancaster to consider a
joint expedition against the Turks “to defend the faith and come to
the aid of Hungary and the Emperor of Constantinople.” But while
peace with England hung re, nothing could be done, and not until
the Duke of Burgundy interested himself did anything happen.
Burgundy was still the principal mover of events. Before
retrieving national power through the King’s madness, he had been
looking for a crusade to go on, with options divided between Prussia
—which would serve no purpose except to keep warriors busy—and
Hungary. In 1391 he sent Guy de Tremoille to Venice and Hungary
to investigate the situation and, persuaded of sucient grandeur in
the cause to suit his requirements, planned a crusade, originally to
be led by himself, Louis d’Orléans, and the Duke of Lancaster. In the
end, none of the three went. Whether defense against the Turks was
seen as a vital European interest is doubtful. Burgundy’s personal
interest in sponsoring the crusade was to magnify himself and his
house, and since he was the prince of self-magnication, the result
was that opulent display became the dominant theme; plans,
logistics, intelligence about the enemy came second, if at all.
The rst problem, as always, was nance. In 1394 Burgundy
demanded an aid of 200,000 livres from Flanders, impoverished
though it was by the years of civil war. Strenuous bargaining by the
Flemish reduced the sum to 130,000, enough to initiate preparations
of unsurpassed luxury in garments if not weapons. In January 1395
the Duke sent a second Tremoille brother, Guillaume, to inform

Sigismund that an ocial request to the King of France for help
would be favorably received.
Four imposing Hungarian knights and a bishop reached Paris in
August. They told the court that Sultan Bajazet was assembling an
army of 40,000 in order to subject Hungary to the fate of Bulgaria,
Wallachia, and Serbia, and that unless the French sent help, the
King of Hungary would soon be reduced to the last distress. They
told how the cruel Turks held Christians in dungeons, carried o
children to be converted to Islam, despoiled maidens, spared no one
and nothing from sacrilege. Their King had given battle several
times with unhappy result against this fearful and powerful enemy.
However painful was such an admission, “the fate of Christians
obliges us to say it.” King Sigismund implored help “in the name of
kinship and the love of God.”
The English marriage having been arranged, King Charles was
able to reply that, “as chief of the Christian Kings,” it devolved upon
him to prevent Christianity from being trampled underfoot by the
Sultan and to punish his erontery. Enthusiasm was general. Comte
d’Eu, now Constable of France, and Boucicaut, now Marshal,
proclaimed it the duty of every man of valor to undertake battle
against the “miscreants,” the word generally used for Moslems as for
peasants and laborers, indicating contempt. Loaded with gifts and
assurances of help, the Hungarian envoys returned, spreading word
of the French crusade on their way through Germany and Austria
and arranging provisions for its passage.
On his return from Italy, two months after the Hungarians’ visit,
Coucy found the court in great excitement over the crusade, and lost
no time in taking the cross. After the habit of his kind, he never
stayed home if he could help it. Burgundy, Orléans, and Lancaster
had all withdrawn from the enterprise, owing to the negotiations
with England which required their presence—or from reluctance to
leave the vicinity of the throne. But the house of Burgundy
remained in control in the person of the Duke’s eldest son, Jean de
Nevers, aged 24 and not yet a knight, whom his father proposed to

put in nominal command. The predestined Cain (in Michelet’s
phrase) to his cousin Louis d’Orléans’ Abel, the Count of Nevers
showed few signs as yet of the decisive character that was to appear
after his father’s death. As Duke, he would be known as Jean Sans
Peur (John the Fearless), meaning, it would seem, that he did not
fear to do evil. Married at fourteen in the famous double wedding,
he was already the father of two. Undersized, with a large head,
hard features, graceless manners, and inelegant dress, he was the
opposite in everything except ambition of his superb and charming
cousin Louis. “Nature,” wrote Michelet, “seemed to have fashioned
him on purpose to hate the Duc d’Orléans.”
While Nevers’ royal blood and position gave éclat to the cause, his
father recognized the need of more responsible leadership, which he
evidently did not expect from either Constable d’Eu or Marshal
Boucicaut, who were both under 35. He turned to Coucy as elder
statesman and the most experienced warrior—since Clisson’s
disgrace—in the realm.
Since he had rst marched at fteen against the English, and at
eighteen hunted down the Jacquerie, the range of Coucy’s
experience had extended over an extraordinary variety of combat,
diplomacy, government, and social and political relationships. As
son-in-law of Edward III, holding double allegiance to two kings at
war, his position had been unique. He had seen war as captain or
one of the top command in eleven campaigns—in Piedmont,
Lombardy, Switzerland, Normandy, Languedoc, Tuscany, northern
France, Flanders, Guelders, Tunisia, Genoa; he had commanded
mercenaries, and fought as ally or antagonist of the Count of Savoy,
Gregory XI, Hawkwood, the Visconti, the Hapsburgs, the Swiss,
Navarrese, Gascons, English, Berbers, the Republic of Florence, and
nobles of Genoa. As diplomat he had negotiated with Pope Clement
VII, the Duke of Brittany, the Count of Flanders, the Queen of
Aragon, with the English at peace parleys, and the rebels of Paris.
He had had one temperamental and extravagant wife eight years his
senior, and a second approximately thirty years his junior. He had
served as adviser and agent of the two royal Dukes, Anjou and

Orléans, as Lieutenant-General of Picardy and later of Guienne, as
member of the Royal Council, as Grand Bouteiller of France, and
had twice been the preferred choice for Constable. He had known
and dealt with every kind of character from the ultra-wicked
Charles of Navarre to the ultra-saintly Pierre de Luxemburg.
Not surprisingly, the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy sent for him
and said, “Sir, we know well that above all other knights of France
you are the most used and expert in all things, wherefore dearly we
require that you would be companion to our son on this voyage and
his chief counselor.”
“Monseigneur and you, Madame,” Coucy replied, “I will go, rstly
for devotion to defend the faith of Jesus Christ; secondly, in that you
do me so much honor as to give me charge of Monseigneur Jean
your son. I shall acquit myself of the charge in all things to the best
of my power.” But, he added, he would prefer to be excused of the
charge and let it be conferred rather on Comte d’Eu and Comte
Jacques de la Marche, both related by blood to Nevers. (As a
D’Artois, D’Eu shared the blood of the Valois, which was the chief
reason he was Constable, while De la Marche, youngest of the
crusaders, “without beard or moustache,” was a Bourbon.)
“Sire de Coucy,” answered the Duke, “you have seen much more
than these two and know better the ordaining of an army in strange
countries than either our cousin D’Eu or De la Marche, therefore we
charge you and pray you to execute our request.” Coucy bowed,
saying, “Your prayer is my command,” and agreed to accept if he
had the aid of Guy and Guillaume de Tremoille and Admiral de
Vienne. Clearly he, too, with unhappy percipience, had no great
condence in the younger men.
Because the problem of command was to be crucial in the
outcome of the crusade, Burgundy’s eort to name a “chief
counselor” is signicant, whether or not Froissart’s report of the
interview is verbatim. Writing history in terms of direct speech was
a license medieval chroniclers allowed themselves. So did
Thucydides. If we accept Pericles’ speech to the Athenians, we need
not balk at Burgundy’s to Coucy. It has been questioned on the
ground that Coucy’s name does not appear as “chief counselor”—or

at all—in the nal list of Nevers’ primary counselors, which
consisted of the two Tremoilles and Odard de Chasseron, all of the
Burgundian court, together with Philippe de Bar and Admiral de
Vienne. Coucy, D’Eu, Boucicaut, De la Marche, and Henri de Bar
made up a separate list whom Nevers could consult “when it seemed
good to him.” As an arrangement for the governance of a military
campaign, this had aws. It may reect some sparring between
Nevers and his father; more fundamentally, it reects the absence of
a concept of unity of command.
Emptied of occupation by the peace with England, knights took
the cross with alacrity “to escape idleness and employ themselves in
chivalry.” Some 2,000 knights and squires are said to have joined,
supported by 6,000 archers and foot soldiers drawn from the best
available volunteers and mercenary companies. Just as he had set a
record for opulence at the double wedding, Burgundy now
determined that the equipment for his son’s debut in war should be
the most resplendent ever. Nevers’ personal company of 200 were
supplied with new livery of a “gay green,” with 24 wagonloads of
green satin tents and pavilions, with four huge banners painted with
the crusade’s emblem—a gure of the Virgin surrounded by the
lilies of France and the arms of Burgundy and Nevers. Pennons for
lances and tents, tabards for the trumpets, velvet saddle blankets
and heraldic costume for twelve trumpeters were all embroidered
with the same emblems in gold and silver, many encrusted with
jewels and ivory. Kitchen equipment was made especially for the
campaign as well as pewter tableware of forty dozen bowls and
thirty dozen plates. Four months’ wages in advance had to be paid
before departure. The cost of all this outran the money raised from
Flanders. New taxes were levied on all Burgundy’s domains,
including the traditional aid for knighting of the eldest son and for
overseas voyage. Payment in lieu of participation in the crusade was
exacted even from old men, women, and children. For further needs
en route, the Duke negotiated loans from municipalities, tax
farmers, Lombards, and other bankers.
Competitive splendor governed the preparations. Coucy’s costs
were covered in part by Louis d’Orléans, who paid him the

remaining 6,000 livres due for the Genoa campaign in a at sum,
plus 2,000 to his son-in-law Henri de Bar and the expenses for
seventeen knights and squires of Louis’ household who were to
follow Coucy’s banner.
First among the foreign allies were the Knights Hospitalers of
Rhodes, who, since the decline of Constantinople and Cyprus, held
the dominant Christian position in the Levant; secondly, the
Venetians, who supplied a eet; and on land, German princes of the
Rhineland, Bavaria, Saxony, and other parts of the Empire who had
been recruited by the Hungarians and joined the French corps en
route. Adventurers from Navarre and Spain, Bohemia and Poland,
where French heralds had proclaimed the crusade, joined
individually. The Italian states were too engaged in their usual
intramural hostilities to send contingents, and the supposed English
presence of which so much has been made is imaginary. No record
exists of the nancing necessary to send an English force abroad,
nor of the necessary royal permission to leave the country. Neither
Henry of Bolingbroke nor other “son of the Duke of Lancaster” could
have led an English contingent, since they and most of the leading
English nobles were present at Richard’s marriage ve months after
the crusade’s departure. Sporadic mention of English participants
can be explained by the presence of Hospitalers of the English
“tongue” who joined their brothers of Rhodes. The question that
remains is not whether the English were present but why they were
absent. It may be that as the contention between King Richard and
Gloucester grew more vehement, each wanted his partisans near at
hand; or it may be that the animosity left by the long war had cut
deeply into the old brotherhood of chivalry, leaving the English
with no taste for a crusade under French leadership.
Enthusiasm was not universal. Nevers’ father-in-law, Albert, Duke
of Bavaria and Count of Hainault, was not impressed by the need to
expel the Turks or defend the Faith. When his son, William of
Ostrevant, with a following of many young knights and squires,
expressed a strong desire to go, Duke Albert curtly told him his
motive was “Vainglory” and asked what reason he had “to seek
arms upon a people and a country that never did us any damage.”

He said William would be better employed to use his forces for the
recovery of family property unlawfully held by the neighboring
lords of Frisia. Allowed a martial enterprise, William was happy to
obey. The eastern frontier of Europe was far away and, given the
communications of the time, the Turks seemed to most Europeans
hardly more than a name.
The papal schism did not incommode the venture. Boniface, the
Roman Pope, to whom Hungary, Venice, and the Germans were
obedient, had been actively preaching the crusade since 1394. He
wanted the prestige, as his late rival Clement had wanted the
prestige of sponsoring a saint. Pope Benedict of Avignon sponsored
the French. At Burgundy’s request, he gave the customary plenary
absolution to crusaders and special permission to take shelter with
“schismatics” (the Greek Christians) and indels.
The departure from Dijon on April 30, 1396, was a superb
spectacle which could not fail to lift the hearts of observers. At the
fulllment of his dream, Mézières, however, could not rejoice. The
humility of pilgrims, he wrote, did not grace the great procession:
“they go like kings, preceded by minstrels and heralds in purple and
rich garments, making great feasts of outrageous foods,” and
spending in one month more than they ought to in three. It would
be the same as previous expeditions, ruined by extravagance and
indiscipline, motivated by chivalry’s love “for one of the great ladies
of the world—Vainglory.”
The crusaders’ route took them via Strasbourg across Bavaria to
the upper Danube and from there, using the river as transport, to
rendezvous with the King of Hungary at Buda (Budapest). The joint
armies would proceed from there against the Turks. Objectives, if
vague, were not modest. After expelling the Turks from the Balkans,
the crusaders planned to come to the aid of Constantinople, cross
the Hellespont, march through Turkey and Syria to liberate
Palestine and the Holy Sepulcher, and return after these triumphs by
sea. Arrangements had been made for the Venetian eet and galleys
of the Emperor Manuel to blockade the Turks in the Sea of Marmora
and for the Venetians to sail up the Danube from the Black Sea to
meet the crusaders in Wallachia in July. As grandiose as the

projected invasion of England and march on Rome, the program was
unaected by past frustrations. Nor had the siege of Mahdia,
involving many of the same leaders, altered their contempt for the
indel as foe. The ranks of chivalry still believed that nothing could
withstand their valor.
Rules of discipline were decreed by a War Council of March 28,
which provided that a noble causing disruption was to lose horse
and harness, a varlet drawing a knife in a quarrel to lose his hand,
anyone committing robbery to lose an ear. The larger question of
obedience to command—which military ordinances since the time
of Jean II had tried and failed to solve—was left untouched. The
Council of March 28 added a nal provision that was to be
determining at Nicopolis: “Item, that [in battle] the Count and his
company claim the avant garde.” Chivalry’s sense of itself required
valor to be proved in the front line. Victory required more.
Coucy did not travel with the main body because he was detached
on a mission to the lord of Milan. Angry at the removal of Genoa
from his sphere of inuence, Gian Galeazzo was maneuvering to
prevent its transfer of sovereignty to the King of France. Coucy was
sent to warn him that his interference would be regarded as a
hostile act. More than Genoa was behind the quarrel. Gian Galeazzo
had turned against France, bitterly if not openly, because his
beloved daughter Valentina was being subjected to a campaign of
slander charging her with bewitching or poisoning the King. The
vicious rumors were the work of Queen Isabeau, who wanted
Valentina out of the way, perhaps from jealousy of her inuence
with the King, or to facilitate her own aair with Orléans, or as part
of Isabeau’s perpetual machinations with Florence against Milan, or
something of each. Whispered in the taverns and markets, among a
public ready to believe ill of the Italian foreigner, the rumors grew
so rampant that mobs shouting threats gathered before Valentina’s
residence. Louis d’Orléans made no eort to defend his wife, but
rather complied with Isabeau’s objective by removing Valentina
from Paris on the excuse of her safety. She was left to live in exile
thereafter at her country residence at Asnières on the Seine, where,
twelve years later, she died.

Valentina’s removal occurred in April, the month of the crusade’s
departure, and was not taken lightly by her adoring father. He
threatened to send knights to defend his daughter’s honor, but his
contemporaries believed he did more than that. For revenge upon
France, he was said to have notied Bajazet of the crusaders’ plan of
campaign and to have kept him closely informed of its progress. The
charge against Gian Galeazzo was probably a product of French
animosity and the search for someone to blame after the appalling
dénouement, but it could also have been true. A Visconti did not
shrink from revenge, especially not the man who had so coolly
dispatched his uncle to prison and death.
It is not impossible that Coucy may have inadvertently revealed
the crusaders’ plan of campaign to his host in Pavia. Gian Galeazzo
was a strange, cheerless, secretive prince who would have concealed
his paternal feelings. With regard to Genoa, however, Coucy’s
intervention was successful; sovereignty was duly transferred to the
King of France in the following November. Coucy, accompanied by
Henri de Bar and their followers, left Milan in May for Venice,
where he requisitioned a ship from the Venetian Senate on May 17
to take him across the Adriatic. He embarked on May 30 for Senj
(Segna), a small port on the Croatian coast. Evidence is lacking of
his route thereafter, but the choice of Senj would indicate that he
and his party traveled to Buda by the most direct way, a journey of
some 300 miles through wild, rugged, and dangerous country.
He reached the rendezvous before Nevers, who was in no hurry.
Stopping along the upper Danube for receptions and festivities
oered by German princes, Nevers and his gorgeous companions in
green and gold did not reach even Vienna until June 24, a month
behind the vanguard under D’Eu and Boucicaut. A eet of seventy
vessels with cargo of wine, our, hay, and other provisions was
dispatched from Vienna down the Danube while Nevers enjoyed
further festivities oered by his sister’s husband, Leopold IV, Duke
of Austria. After borrowing from his brother-in-law the huge sum of
100,000 ducats, which took time to arrange, Nevers nally arrived
in Buda at some time in July.

Sigismund welcomed his allies with joy not unmixed with
apprehension. Although the Hungarian nobles had taken the cross
with enthusiasm, their loyalty to him was not perfect, and he
foresaw diculties in the problem of a combined march and a
coordinated strategy with the visitors. The French were not disposed
to take advice, and the habits of pillage and brigandage, grown
routine in the last fty years of warfare, had already been exhibited
on their march through Germany.
Strategy also had to be coordinated with the ardent crusader
Philibert de Naillac, Grand Master of the Hospitalers, and with
representatives of the Venetian eet. The 44 ships of Venice,
carrying the Hospitalers from Rhodes, sailed through the Aegean
into the Sea of Marmora, and some of them continued into the Black
Sea and up the Danube, without meeting hostile action. Inferior at
sea, the Turks did not challenge them, nor did they in turn blockade
the Turks in Asia, which suggests that Bajazet and a large part of his
forces were already on the European side.
Conict immediately marked the War Council at Buda. Sigismund
advised waiting for the Turks to take the oensive and then giving
battle when they reached his borders where he exercised control,
thus avoiding the diculties of a long march and the uncertainties
to be encountered in the doubtful territory of the schismatics. He
had led a campaign against the Turks in Wallachia in the previous
year, as a result of which Bajazet had sent heralds to declare war
and to announce his intention to be in Hungary before the end of
May. The Sultan had boasted that after chasing Sigismund out of
Hungary he would continue on to Italy, where he would plant his
banners on the hills of Rome and feed his horse oats on the altar of
St. Peter’s.
Now, by the end of July, he had not appeared. Reconnaissance
parties sent out by Sigismund as far as the Hellespont showed no
signs of the “Great Turk,” causing the French to declare him a
coward who did not dare face them. Sigismund assured them the
Sultan would come and it were better to let him extend himself in a
long march rather than undertake it themselves. But with his
reputation as something of a lightweight, Sigismund had neither the

authority, the force of character, nor the prestige to make his advice
prevail. The French insisted they would chase the Turks out of
Europe wherever they were found, and boasted that “if the sky were
to fall they would uphold it on the points of their lances.”
Chosen as spokesman for the allies (tending to conrm his
position as “chief counselor”), Coucy rejected a defensive strategy.
“Though the Sultan’s boasts be lies,” he said, “that should not keep
us from doing deeds of arms and pursuing our enemies, for that is
the purpose for which we came.” He said the crusaders were
determined to seek out the enemy. His words were upheld by all the
French and foreign allies present at the Council, although they
aroused a fatal jealousy in Comte d’Eu, who felt that as Constable he
should have taken precedence as spokesman.
Sigismund was forced to acquiesce; he could hardly, at this point,
hang back. The march went forward, down the left bank of the
Danube. Part of the Hungarian army veered out to the north to
gather in the reluctant vassal forces of Wallachia and Transylvania.
The main body of the allies followed the wide, at, dreary river,
where the only life was the ickering of water birds in the brown
water and an occasional sherman’s boat poking out from the reed-
grown banks. The remainder of the Hungarians under King
Sigismund brought up the rear. French indiscipline and
debaucheries reportedly increased the farther they went. Suppers
were served of the nest wines and richest foods, transported by
boat. Knights and squires indulged themselves with prostitutes they
had brought along, and their example encouraged the men in
outrages upon the women of the countries through which they
passed. The arrogance and frivolity of the French irritated their
allies, causing continual conicts. Pillage and maltreatment of the
inhabitants grew unrestrained as they entered the schismatic lands,
further alienating peoples already hostile to Hungary. Appalled by
such conduct under the banner of the Virgin and in the cause of the
cross, accompanying clerics pleaded for discipline and threatened
the anger of God in vain. “They might as well,” wrote the Monk of
St. Denis, “have talked to a deaf ass.”

The tale of French “wrongs, robberies, lubricities, and dishonest
things,” told from hearsay, is long and explicit and has grown over
the centuries. The Monk of St. Denis, basing his account of the
crusade on what was told him by a survivor, vibrates with moral
disapproval. He treats the French crusaders throughout with utmost
scorn and reproach, denouncing them for immorality and
blasphemy, for games of dice, “the father of cheating and lies,” and
warning repeatedly of a dire outcome to punish their wickedness.
Taking their cue from him, later historians waxed purple on the
subject of a perpetual bacchanalia, of young knights spending whole
days with their fallen women in shameful pleasures, of soldiers
drowned in wine. To know the truth is beyond our reach, for it must
be remembered that even the contemporary accounts were written
ex post facto when the natural reaction was to blame the tragedy of
the crusade on the moral failure of the crusaders. Had they been
victorious, would they have been charged with so many rich and
lurid villainies?
At Orsova, where the Danube narrows through a dele called the
Iron Gates, the expedition crossed over to the right bank. The
crossing on pontoons and in boats took eight days, though not
because the army numbered anything like the 100,000 sometimes
suggested. For such a number to cross would have taken a month.
Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the
event. Like the Black Death, the Battle of Nicopolis was to shed so
dark a shadow that some reports of the number of combatants range
up to 400,000, with the chroniclers of each side giving the enemy
twice as many as their own. The nearest to a rsthand gure is that
given by the German Schiltberger, a participant, not a chronicler.
The servant—or “runner,” as he calls himself—of a Bavarian noble,
he was a boy of sixteen when captured by the Turks at Nicopolis,
and wrote, or more likely dictated, his simple unadorned narrative
from memory when he nally made his way home after thirty years
in bondage to the Turks. He places the total Christian forces at
16,000. German historians of the 19th century arrived by various
intricate processes at a gure of about 7,500 to 9,000 for the
Christians and somewhere from 12,000 to 20,000 for the Turks.

They note in passing the impossibility of feeding o the country
men and horses in the scores, much less hundreds, of thousands.
(Five hundred years later, on the same battleground in the Russo-
Turkish war of 1877, as pointed out by a recent student of the
problem, the opposing forces numbered 8,000 Turks against some
10,000 Russians.)
Vidin, the western Bulgarian capital held under Turkish
suzerainty, was the crusaders’ rst conquest. Its native prince,
having no great motive to ght for an alien conqueror against an
overwhelming force of invaders, promptly surrendered, foiling the
French of combat. Although the only bloodshed was the slaughter of
Turkish ocers of the garrison, the eld of Vidin nevertheless
served for the knighting of Nevers and 300 companions. They felt
conrmed in condence as they moved on; Turkish garrison forces
were enough to hold the Bulgarians in vassalage but not enough to
challenge the great Christian army.
The next objective, 75 miles farther on, was Rachowa (Oryekova),
a strong fortress protected by a moat and a double ring of walls.
Determined on deeds of arms, the French hastened by a night march
to reach it ahead of their allies and arrived at dawn just as the
Turkish defenders came out to destroy the bridge over the moat. In
a erce ght, 500 men-at-arms including Coucy, D’Eu, Boucicaut,
De la Marche, and Philippe de Bar gained the bridge but against
vigorous resistance could make no further headway until Sigismund
sent up reinforcements. Rather than allow others to share the honor
of the ght, Boucicaut would have rejected the aid, but in spite of
him the forces combined and reached the walls as night fell. Next
morning, before combat could be renewed, the Bulgarian
inhabitants arranged to surrender the town to Sigismund on
condition that their goods and lives would be spared. Violating the
surrender, the French put the town to pillage and massacre,
claiming later that the place was taken by assault because their
men-at-arms had already scaled the walls. A thousand prisoners,
both Turkish and Bulgarian, were seized for ransom and the town
left in ames. The Hungarians took the action as an insult to their

King; the French charged the Hungarians with trying to rob them of
their glory; Sigismund’s apprehensions were conrmed.
Leaving a garrison to hold Rachowa, the divided army moved on
to Nicopolis, storming and seizing one or two forts and settlements
on the way, but by-passing one citadel from which emissaries
escaped to carry news of the Christian army to the Sultan.
Where was Bajazet? The question has been endlessly debated.
Was he still in Asia or already on the march? He was to reach
Nicopolis with a massive force within three weeks of the taking of
Rachowa, too short a time, even given his reputation for speed, to
have assembled and ferried an army across the straits. The allied
eet, which might have prevented his passage, engaged in no naval
action. The likelihood is that Bajazet was already on the European
side at the siege of Constantinople, where he learned of the
crusaders’ plan of campaign—if he was not already informed by
Gian Galeazzo—through intercepting correspondence between
Sigismund and the Emperor Manuel. Breaking o the siege, he
marched with the forces he had, gathering others at garrisons en
route.
As the key to control of the lower Danube and communications
with the interior, Nicopolis was essential to the crusaders, who quite
rightly made it their strategic objective. They came within sight of
the fortress high on its limestone cli on September 12. A road ran
along the narrow space between the river’s edge and the base of the
cli. On the inland side a ravine split the cli into two heights
dominating the lower town and descending steeply to the plain. Like
the castle of Coucy, it was a site formed by nature for command.
The so-called fortress was actually two walled and fortied
enclosures or towns, the larger one on the blu and the smaller
below, each containing military, civil, and religious buildings and in
the larger one a bazaar or street of shops. The French had no
diculty recognizing an objective as formidable as Mahdia, even
without the knowledge that it was well supplied with arms and
provisions and commanded by a resolute Turkish governor, Dogan
Bey. Convinced that the Sultan must come to the defense of so

important a stronghold, the Governor was prepared to ght for
time, and resist, if necessary, to the end.
The French had brought no catapults or other siege weapons, as
they had brought none against Barbary. Funds had been invested in
silks and velvet and gold embroidery, cargo space packed with
wines and festive provisions. Why drag heavy machinery a thousand
miles across Europe for use against a contemptible enemy?
Something fundamental in the culture determined these choices.
Boucicaut made light of the lack of siege weapons. No matter,
said he, ladders were easily made and, when used by men of
courage, were worth more than any catapults. Knighthood’s zealot,
Boucicaut at age twelve had served as the Duc de Bourbon’s page in
the Normandy campaign, at sixteen was knighted at Roosebeke, at
24 held the lists at St. Ingelbert for thirty days, the most admired
exploit of his generation. Two years later, in 1391, he was created
Marshal. Unable to endure repose, he had gone twice to ght with
the Teutonic Knights in Prussia and, afterward, to the East to
ransom D’Eu in Cairo and visit Jerusalem. In honor of an episode in
Tunisia when the Saracens were supposedly stopped from attack by
the descent from Heaven of two beauteous women in white bearing
a banner with a scarlet cross, he created an Order of the White Lady
with the stated purpose of providing defenders of the gentle sex
whenever needed. He was the epitome, not the norm, of chivalry,
and could well have expressed (although the words are those of
Jean de Beuil, a knight of the next century) what it was that
inspired his kind in an age of personal combat:
How seductive is war! When you know your quarrel to be just and your blood
ready for combat, tears come to your eyes. The heart feels a sweet loyalty and
pity to see one’s friend expose his body in order to do and accomplish the
command of his Creator. Alongside him, one prepares to live or die. From
that comes a delectable sense which no one who has not experienced it will
ever know how to explain. Do you think that a man who has experienced that
can fear death? Never, for he is so comforted, so enraptured that he knows
not where he is and truly fears nothing.

Neither impetuous assault nor mines deep enough to hold three
men upright could force entry into Nicopolis. The lack of siege
engines and the steep slopes made it impossible to take the place by
storm, necessitating a siege by blockade. The crusaders invested
Nicopolis on all sides, strictly guarded all exits, and, with the
addition of the allied blockade in the river, settled down to let the
garrison and inhabitants starve. Two weeks passed in slackening
discipline, in feasting, games, debaucheries, and the voicing of
contempt for the non-appearing enemy. Allies were invited to
splendid dinners in tents ornamented with pictures; nobles
exchanged visits, appearing every day in new clothes with long
sleeves and the inevitable pointed shoes. Despite hospitality,
sarcasm and jokes about the courage of their allies deepened ill-
feeling in the army. In drunkenness and carelessness, no sentinels
were posted. Natives of the region, alienated by pillage, brought in
no information. Foragers, however, moving farther out each day,
reported rumors of the Turks’ approach.
In truth, the Sultan with cavalry and infantry had by now passed
through Adrianople and was advancing at forced pace over the
Shipka pass to Tirnovo. A reconnaissance party of 500 Hungarian
horsemen, sent forward by Sigismund, penetrated to the vicinity of
Tirnovo, seventy miles to the south, and brought back word that the
“Great Turk” was coming indeed. The same word passing to the
beleaguered and desperate inhabitants of Nicopolis set o shouts of
celebration and the noise of trumpets and drums, which Boucicaut
claimed was a ruse. Convinced that the Turks would never dare
attack, he threatened to cut o the ears of anyone reporting rumors
of their approach, as demoralizing to the camp.
Coucy was less inclined to sit in ignorance for pride’s sake, and
felt the need of action to arouse the camp. “Let us nd out what sort
of men our enemies are,” he said. According to a veteran’s account
told to the chronicler Jehan de Wavrin fty years later, Coucy was
consistently gracious to the local allies and “willingly kept by him
the good companions of Wallachia who were well acquainted with
Turkish customs and stratagems.” Always a practical warrior, he
was one of the few to concern himself with the nature and

whereabouts of the enemy. With Renaud de Roye and Jean de
Saimpy, Burgundy’s chamberlain, and a company of 500 lances and
500 mounted archers, he rode south. Learning that a large Turkish
body was approaching through a pass, he detached a party of 200
horsemen to engage the enemy and by a feigned retreat to draw
them into pursuit, enabling the rest of the troop, concealed in
ambush, to take them in the rear. This was a regular tactic for use
when the terrain favored it, and it worked on this occasion with
complete success. As the Turks rushed past, the crusaders issued
from their concealment among the trees crying, “Our Lady be with
the Sire de Coucy!” and closed in upon them from behind while the
French vanguard, turning back from its feigned ight, attacked from
the front. Thrown into confusion, the Turks could not rally and
suered great slaughter. Giving no quarter, Coucy’s troop killed as
many as they could and left the eld, “happy that they could escape
thence and return as they came.”
Coucy’s victory shook the camp from its frivolities, but with two
unfortunate eects: it increased French condence and it aggravated
the Constable’s jealousy, “for he saw how the Sire de Coucy had the
admiration of all the company and also of the foreigners.”
Fomenting discord, he accused Coucy of imperiling the army out of
bravado and depriving Nevers of leadership and glory.
Sigismund convened a council of war. He proposed that the
Wallachian foot soldiers should be sent forward to meet the enemy’s
vanguard, which was customarily a rabble of rough conscripts
whom the Turks sent ahead of their main force for purposes of
pillage. In battle they were exposed to the brunt of opponents’
attack in order to tire them. They were not worthy, Sigismund said,
of the combat of knights. When the shock of contact had been
absorbed by the common soldiers, French chivalry, forming the
crusaders’ front line, could enter battle in full and fresh strength.
The Hungarians and allies would follow to support their attack and
keep the sipahis, or Turkish cavalry, from dashing in upon their
anks. The honor and glory of battle, Sigismund is supposed to have
concluded, did not lie in the rst blows but in the last—in those
blows that nished the combat and decided the victory.

D’Eu furiously objected. French knights had not come so far, he
said, to be preceded into battle by a miserable peasant militia more
accustomed to ee than to ght. The knight’s custom was not to
follow, but to lead and to encourage others by his example. “To take
up the rear is to dishonor us and expose us to the contempt of all.”
Moreover, as Constable, he claimed the front place; anyone ahead of
him would do him a mortal insult—an obvious reference to Coucy.
Boucicaut supported him warmly; Nevers, in the belief that Turkish
sabers and scimitars could not resist the lances and swords of
France, was easily persuaded along with the younger hotheads of his
suite. Sigismund departed to make his own battle plan.
Apparently within hours—the accounts are confused—he sent
back a message that Bajazet was now within six hours’ march of
Nicopolis. The crusaders, said to be carousing at dinner and
befuddled with wine, rose in disorder, some scorning the report,
some in panic, some hastily arming. All the aws and dissensions of
the campaign came to a head in an atrocious act. Supposedly for
lack of guards to spare, the prisoners of Rachowa were massacred,
perhaps with less compunction because they were schismatics and
indels. No chronicler mentions who gave the order, although the
Monk of St. Denis and others recognized it as an act of “barbarism.”
At daybreak, as ranks were forming under the banners of the
leaders, Sigismund, in a last eort, sent his Grand Marshal to report
that only the Turkish vanguard had been sighted and to plead
against a hasty oensive without knowledge of how near or how
numerous was the Sultan’s main force. Scouts had been sent out and
would return within two hours with the information necessary for a
plan of battle. The crusaders could rest assured, said the Marshal,
that if they waited they were in no danger of being surrounded.
“Sirs, do as I advise, for these are the orders of the King of Hungary
and his council.”
Nevers, hastily summoning his own council, asked for the opinion
of Coucy and Vienne, who advised obeying the King of Hungary’s
desire, which seemed to them wise. “He has the right to tell us what
he wants us to do,” Coucy said. D’Eu burst out, “Yes, yes, the King
of Hungary wishes to have the ower and honor of battle.” That was

his reason and no other. “We are the vanguard. He granted it to us
and now wants to take it back. Those who want to may believe him.
I do not.” Seizing his banner, he cried, “Forward, in the name of
God and St. George, you shall see me today a valorous knight!”
This speech by the brainless Constable, a third choice for that
oce, was declared a “presumption” by Coucy. He asked for the
comment of Vienne, who, as eldest knight, carried the sovereign
banner of the crusade. “When truth and reason cannot be heard,”
replied the Admiral, “then must presumption rule.” If the Constable
wished to ght, he said, the army must follow, but it would be
stronger if it advanced in unity with the Hungarian and allied
forces. D’Eu obstinately refused to wait. The dispute grew angry,
with the hotheads charging that their elders were moved not so
much by prudence as by fear. The familiar slights of each other’s
courage were ung. If Coucy and Vienne submitted, it was because
prudence cannot make a strong case against the mystique of valor.
D’Eu gave the signal to advance, with himself in command of the
van. Nevers and Coucy commanded the main body. With their backs
to the fortress and the town, the French knights on their war-horses,
so brilliantly armored “that every man seemed a king,” rode forward
with their mounted archers toward the enemy coming down from
the hills ahead. The date was September 25. The Hospitalers,
Germans, and other allies remained with the King of Hungary, who
no longer controlled events.
The impact of the French assault easily smashed the untrained
conscripts in the Turkish front lines. With the hot taste of success,
even against opponents so unequal, the knights plunged ahead
against the lines of trained infantry. They came under volleys of
lethal arrows and up against rows of sharpened stakes which the
Turks had planted with the points at the height of a horse’s belly.
How the French broke through is unclear. Out of the welter of
dierent versions, a coherent account of the movements and
fortunes of the battleeld is not to be had; there is only a tossing
kaleidoscope. There are references to horses impaled, riders
dismounting, stakes pulled up, presumably by the French auxiliaries.
The knights fought on with sword and battle-ax, and, by their ardor

and heavy weight of their horses and weapons, appear to have
dominated and routed the Turkish infantry, who circled back to take
refuge behind their cavalry. Coucy and Vienne urged a pause at this
stage to rest and restore order in the ranks and give the Hungarians
time to come up, but the younger men, “boiling with ardor” and
believing they had glimpsed victory, insisted on pursuit. Having no
idea of the enemy’s numerical strength, they thought that what they
had encountered so far was his whole force.
Accounts tell of a scramble uphill, of the sipahis on the wings
sweeping down for envelopment, of the Hungarians and foreign
contingents caught in confused combat on the plain, of a stampede
of riderless horses—evidently from the line of stakes, where, in the
havoc, the pages could not hold them. At sight of the stampede, the
Wallachians and Transylvanians instantly concluded that the day
was lost and deserted. Sigismund and the Grand Master of Rhodes
and the Germans rallied their forces against the Turkish
envelopment and were ghting with “unspeakable massacre” on
both sides when a critical reinforcement of 1,500 Serbian horsemen
gave the advantage to the enemy. As a vassal of the Sultan, the
Serbian Despot, Stephen Lazarevich, might have chosen passive
neutrality like the Bulgarians on whose soil the struggle was being
fought, but he hated the Hungarians more than the Turks, and chose
active delity to his Moslem overlord. His intervention was decisive.
Sigismund’s forces were overwhelmed. Dragged from the eld by
their friends, the King and the Grand Master escaped to a
sherman’s boat on the Danube and, under a rain of arrows from
their pursuers, succeeded in boarding a vessel of the allied eet.
The French crusaders, of whom more than half were unhorsed,
struggled in heavy armor to the plateau, where they expected to
nd the debris of the Turkish army. Instead, they found themselves
face to face with a fresh corps of sipahis held in reserve by the
Sultan. “The lion in them turned to timid hare,” writes the Monk of
St. Denis unkindly. With harsh clamor of trumpets and kettle drums
and the war cry “Allah is Great!” the Turks closed in upon them.
The French recognized the end. Some ed back down the slope; the
rest fought with the energy of despair, “no frothing boar nor

enraged wolf more ercely.” D’Eu’s sword arm slashed right and left
as bravely as he had boasted it would. Boucicaut, lled with
warrior’s pride mixed with shame for his errors that had brought his
companions to this fatality, fought with an unlimited audacity that
carved a circle of death around him. Philippe de Bar and Odard de
Chasseron were killed. The banner of Notre Dame clutched in the
hand of Admiral de Vienne wavered and fell. Bleeding from many
wounds, he raised it again and, while trying to rally the faint-
hearted from ight, with banner in one hand and sword in the
other, was struck down and slain. Coucy’s outstanding gure was
seen “unshaken by the heavy leather clubs of the Saracens that beat
upon his head” and their weapons that battered his armor. “For he
was tall and heavy and of great strength and delivered such blows
upon them as cut them all to pieces.”
The Turks closed round Nevers. His bodyguard, prostrating
themselves in attitudes of submission, appealed wordlessly for his
life. Holy war or not, the indel was as interested in rich ransoms as
anyone else, and spared the Count. Upon his surrender, the
remaining French yielded. The Battle of Nicopolis was lost, the
debacle complete. Thousands of prisoners were taken, all the
crusaders’ equipment, provisions, banners, and golden clothes fell to
the victors. “Since the Battle of Roncesvalles when [all] twelve peers
of France were slain, Christendom received not so great a damage.”
Though Froissart could not have known it, his epitaph for the
crusade was historically just. The valor of the French had been
extraordinary and the damage they inicted on the enemy sucient
to show that if they had fought united with their allies, the result—
and the history of Europe—might have been dierent. As it was, the
Turks’ victory, by turning back the Western challenge and retaining
Nicopolis, lodged them rmly in Europe, ensured the fall of
Constantinople, and sealed their hold on Bulgaria for the next 500
years. “We lost the day by the pride and vanity of these French,”
Sigismund said to the Grand Master; “if they had believed my
advice, we had enough men to ght our enemies.”
The defeat was followed by a frightful sequel. As Bajazet toured
the battleeld, hoping to nd the corpse of the King of Hungary—

and nding that of Vienne with the banner still held by his dead
hand—he was “torn by grief” at the sight of his losses, which
outnumbered the Christian. He swore he would not leave their
blood unavenged, and the discovery of the massacre of the prisoners
of Rachowa augmented his rage. He ordered all prisoners to be
brought before him next morning. Jacques de Helly, a French knight
who had seen service with Murad I, was recognized by Turkish
ocials and called upon to designate the leading nobles for ransom.
Coucy, Bar, D’Eu, Guy de Tremoille, Jacques de la Marche, and a
number of others in addition to the Count of Nevers were thus
spared, as well as all those judged to be under twenty for forced
service with the Turks.
The rest, an uncertain gure of several thousand, were marched
naked before the Sultan, bound together in groups of three or four,
with hands tied and ropes around their necks. Bajazet looked at
them briey, then signed to the executioners to set to work. They
decapitated the captives group by group, in some cases cut their
throats or severed their limbs until corpses and killers alike were
awash in blood. Nevers, Coucy, and the rest were forced to stand by
the Sultan and watch the heads of their companions fall under the
scimitars and the blood spurt from their headless trunks. Boucicaut,
dazed and wounded, was recognized in the line. Nevers fell on his
knees before the Sultan and, by a pantomime of hands pressed
together with ngers entwined, indicating that they were like
brothers, capable of equal ransom, succeeded in having Boucicaut
spared. The killing continued from early morning to late afternoon
until Bajazet, himself sickened at the sight or, as some say,
persuaded by his ministers that too much rage in Christendom
would be raised against him, called o the executioners. Estimates
of the number killed range—aside from the wilder gures—from
300 to 3,000.
The dead on the battleeld were many more, nor did all the
fugitives reach safety. Some escaped the Turks only to drown in the
Danube when the ships which they boarded in eeing hordes
became overloaded and sank. Afterward those on board knocked o
others trying to get on. A Polish knight swam across in armor, but

most who tried this feat went under. Fearful of treachery on
Wallachian shores, Sigismund sailed to the Black Sea and
Constantinople and eventually made his way home by sea. Those of
his allies who succeeded in crossing the Danube and attempted to
return by land found the country stripped by the Wallachians. They
wandered in the woods, reduced to rags and misery, covering
themselves with hay and straw. Robbed, ragged, and starving, many
perished on their way; a few reached their homes, among them
Count Rupert of Bavaria in beggar’s clothes, who died of his
suerings a few days later.
Luxury and immorality, pride and dissension, superior Turkish
training, discipline, and tactics all contributed to the fatal outcome.
Nevertheless, what basically defeated the crusaders was the
chivalric insistence on personal prowess—which raises the question:
Why do men ght? Wars may be fought for the glorication of
man’s feelings about himself, or for a specic goal in power,
territory, or political balance. Medieval war was not always
impractical. Charles V cared nothing for glorication if he could
only get the English out of France. In the campaigns of Normandy,
Arezzo, and Genoa, Coucy used every other means rst—money,
diplomacy, and political bargains—and arms only last, to achieve a
specic objective. For all his chivalric renown, of the kind that
attracted Nottingham’s challenge, he belonged rather to the school
of Charles V than to that of Boucicaut, although he seems to have
had a foot in each.
Within a few years of the deaths of Charles V and Du Guesclin in
1380, their pragmatism had been unlearned. It had been successful
but aberrant. The chivalric idea reasserted itself and determined the
choices made in the course of the Nicopolis campaign. Why, in a
society dominated by the cult of the warrior, was extravagant
display more important than the equipment of victory? Why was
absolutely nothing learned from an experience as recent as Mahdia?
All the grandiose projects of the last decade—invasion of England,
Guelders, Tunisia, the Voie de Fait—were either castles in the air or

exercises in futility. Why, after a less than glorious fty years since
Crécy, was the attitude of the French crusaders so steeped in
arrogance and overcondence? Why were they unable to take into
account the fact of opponents who did not ght for the same values
and who obeyed dierent rules? It can only be answered that a
dominant idea is slow to change and that, regardless of everything,
the French still believed themselves supreme in war.
The crusaders of 1396 started out with a strategic purpose in the
expulsion of the Turks from Europe, but their minds were on
something else. The young men of Boucicaut’s generation, born
since the Black Death and Poitiers and the nadir of French fortunes,
harked back to pursuit of those strange bewitchments, honor and
glory. They thought only of being in the vanguard, to the exclusion
of reconnaissance, tactical plan, and common sense, and for that
their heads were to roll in blood-soaked sand at the Sultan’s feet.

Chapter 27

D
Hung Be the Heavens with Black
ead, deserted, or captive, the great Christian army was no
more. The way to Hungary was open, but the Turks had
sustained losses too great to allow them to proceed. In that
sense the crusaders had not fought in vain. An attack of gout
suered by Bajazet, which supposedly prevented him from
advancing, evoked from Gibbon the proposition that “An
acrimonious humor falling on a single bre of one man may prevent
or suspend the misery of nations.” In reality, not gout but the limits
of military capacity were the deciding factor. The Sultan turned
back to Asia, after rst sending Jacques de Helly, on his oath to
return, to carry word of the Turkish victory and demand for
ransoms to the King of France and Duke of Burgundy.
The ordeal of the prisoners, many of them wounded, on the 350-
mile march to Gallipoli was cruel. Stripped of clothing down to their
shirts, in most cases without shoes, with hands tied, beaten and
brutalized by their escorts, they followed on foot at their captors’
heels over the mountain range and down onto the plain. To nobles
equestrian almost from birth, the indignity of the barefoot trek was
as great as the physical suering. At Adrianople the Sultan paused
for two weeks. The next stage took the march across the great,
empty, treeless plain stretching, as if without horizon, toward the
Hellespont. Not a bush nor shelter nor person was to be seen. The
sun blazed down by day; when it set, the winds were chill and the
October nights cold. In alien hands, uncared for and barely fed,
crushed by defeat and fearful of the Sultan’s intentions, the
prisoners were in circumstances more dire than they had ever
known.
Coucy, eldest of the captives, never before a prisoner nor a loser—
in which he was virtually unique for his time—survived only by a

miracle, not a metaphoric miracle but one of faith. Clad only in a
“little jacket,” with bare legs and the nal indignity of no head
covering, he was on the point of collapse from cold and exhaustion.
Believing himself about to die, he prayed for aid to Notre Dame of
Chartres. Though the cathedral was not of his province, the Virgin
of Chartres was highly renowned as having been seen in person and
known to have performed miracles.
“Suddenly, where there had been no one seen along the road
stretching far over at country, a Bulgarian appeared who was not
of a people favorable to us.” The mysterious stranger carried a gown
and hat and heavy cloak which he gave to the Sire de Coucy, who
put them on and was so restored in spirit by this sign of heavenly
favor that he found new vigor to continue the march.
In gratitude, Coucy was to leave 600 gold orins in his last will to
Chartres Cathedral, which was duly paid after his death by Georey
Maupoivre, a physician who accompanied the crusade, shared the
captivity, witnessed the miracle, and served as Coucy’s executor. He
recorded the circumstances for the chapter of Chartres in order that
they might know the origin of the unexpected gift.
At Gallipoli the nobles among the captives were kept in the upper
rooms of the tower, while the 300 common prisoners—the boy
Schiltberger among them—who were the Sultan’s share of the booty
were held below. The worst of the harsh conditions was deprivation
of wine, the Europeans’ daily drink throughout their lives. When the
ship bearing Sigismund from Constantinople passed through the
Hellespont less than half a mile from shore, the Turks, unable to
challenge it at sea, lined up their prisoners at the water’s edge and
called mockingly to the King to come out of his boat and deliver his
comrades. Sigismund had in fact made overtures from
Constantinople to ransom his allies, though they had cost him the
war, but his means were depleted and the Sultan knew there was
more money to be had from France.
Clinging to Europe’s farthest edge, the prisoners could see the
fatal shores of Troy across the straits where the most famous, most
foolish, most grievous war of myth or history, the archetype of
human bellicosity, had been played out. Nothing mean nor great,

sorrowful, heroic nor absurd had been missing from that ten years’
catalogue of woe. Agamemnon had sacriced a daughter for a wind
to ll his sails, Cassandra had warned her city and was not believed,
Helen regretted in bitterness her fatal elopement, Achilles, to vent
rage for the death of his friend, seven times dragged dead Hector
through the dust at his chariot wheels. When the combatants oered
each other peace, the gods whispered lies and played tricks until
they quarreled and fought again. Troy fell and ames consumed it,
and from that prodigious ruin Agamemnon went home to be
betrayed and murdered. Since then, through some 2,500 years, how
much had changed? The romance of Troy was a favorite of the
Middle Ages; Hector was one of the Nine Worthies carved on
Coucy’s castle walls. Did he, the Odysseus of this new war, think of
that ancient siege and hollow triumph as he gazed across the straits?
After two months at Gallipoli, the prisoners were transferred to
Brusa, the Ottoman capital in Asia. Forty miles inland and enclosed
by a crescent of mountains, Brusa foreclosed any idea of rescue and
removed them even farther from contact with home. Everything
depended on ransom. The wait until word could reach and return
from France was long and the Sultan’s temper uncertain in the
interval. The prisoners feared he might order their deaths at any
moment, as easily as they had sent to death the prisoners of
Rachowa.
Unbelievable rumors trickled into Paris in the rst week of
December. That the indel could have crushed the elite of France
and Burgundy seemed unimaginable; nevertheless, anxiety mounted.
In the absence of ocial news, the rumor-mongers were imprisoned
in the Châtelet and, if convicted of lying, were to be condemned to
death by drowning. The King, the Duke of Burgundy, Louis
d’Orléans, and the Duc de Bar each sent separate envoys speeding to
Venice and Hungary to learn news of the crusaders, to nd them,
deliver letters, and bring back replies. On December 16 trading
ships brought news into Venice of the disaster at Nicopolis and of

Sigismund’s escape, but by Christmas Paris was still without ocial
word.
On Christmas Day, Jacques de Helly “all booted and spurred”
entered the Palace of St. Pol, where the court was assembled for the
solemn rites of the day, and, kneeling before the King, conrmed
the terrible truth of the defeat. He told of the campaign, the
climactic battle, the “glorious deaths,” and Bajazet’s hideous
revenge. The court listened in consternation. The King and Dukes
questioned Helly intently. The letters he brought from Nevers and
the other seigneurs were the rst news of who was alive and, by
omission, who was missing or dead. Weeping relatives crowded
around to learn the fate of son or husband or friend. Helly assured
his audience that the Sultan would accept ransom, for he “loved
gold and riches.” If Froissart may be believed (which he need not
always be), the seigneurs present expressed themselves “fortunate to
be in a world where there could have been such a battle and to have
knowledge of so powerful a heathen King as Amurath-Bequin” (one
of the various versions of the name of this distant potentate), who,
with all his lineage, “would derive honor from the great adventure.”
What signies is not whether these sentiments were actually
expressed, but that they were considered by Froissart the
appropriate sentiments for the occasion. At the close of the
audience, the rumor-mongers of the Châtelet were released.
The nobility felt “bitter despair,” according to the Monk of St.
Denis, and “aiction reigned in all hearts.” Black garments
appeared everywhere, and Deschamps wrote of “funerals from morn
to eve.” Prayers and tears lled the churches, with sorrow the more
intense because the dead had received no Christian burial and the
lives of the survivors were feared for. Mourning and lament spread
through Burgundy, where so many families suered a loss. On
January 9, a day of solemn services for the dead in the capital and
the provinces, “it was piteous to hear the tolling of the bells in all
the churches of Paris.” Hardly had the English marriage been
celebrated and the burden of the old war lifted at last when

rejoicing was stied, as if God did not wish to allow mankind cause
for joy.
The ladies of France sorrowed grievously for their husbands and
lovers, “especially,” says Froissart, always concerned for his patron,
“the Dame de Coucy, who wept piteously night and day and could
take no comfort.” Probably at the suggestion of her brothers, the
Duc de Lorraine and Ferry de Lorraine, who came to console and
advise her, she wrote on December 31 to the Doge of Venice
begging him to aid in arranging the ransom of her husband. Two
envoys—Robert d’Esne, a knight of Cambresis with ve attendants,
and Jacques de Willay, châtelain of St. Gobain, one of the Coucy
properties—were dispatched separately, expressly to arrange the
deliverance of Coucy and Henri de Bar. They were sent and their
expenses paid by Louis d’Orléans, rather than by the Dame de
Coucy. With communications no faster than a man could travel,
there could be no word for many months.
The problem of arranging ransom was riddled with anxiety
because of the unfamiliarity of dealing with a sovereign outside
Christendom, of whom only the worst might be expected. On the
advice of Jacques de Helly, who reported the Sultan’s exorbitant
passion for the accoutrements of the hunt, a convoy of magnicent
gifts, especially selected to appeal to him, was assembled to
accompany the Duke’s ambassadors. Twelve white gerfalcons, of a
rare and costly species of which Gian Galeazzo reportedly sent two
to the Sultan every year, were escorted each by its own falconer,
together with falconers’ gauntlets embroidered with pearls and
precious stones. Ten handsome horses and ten hounds, caparisoned
in the arms of Burgundy and conducted by grooms in the Duke’s
white-and-scarlet livery, were to make the journey to Turkey, along
with saddles of rich work inscribed in “Saracen letters and owers
of overseas,” saddle draperies with buckles in the form of golden
roses, ne scarlet cloth of Reims believed unknown in the Orient,
and, as a subtle compliment to Bajazet, tapestries of Arras depicting
the history of Alexander the Great, from whom he claimed to be
directly descended. All this was dispatched with the King’s
chamberlain, an experienced diplomat, and three noble

ambassadors, ocials of Burgundy, who departed on January 20,
1397, to negotiate the ransom. In haste to keep his oath to the
Sultan, Jacques de Helly had already hurried on ahead with letters
for the prisoners.
Reconciliation with Gian Galeazzo because of his known inuence
at the Ottoman court had suddenly become all-important. The
ambassadors were directed to travel via Milan and convey to Gian
Galeazzo, whose rst wife had been a princess of France, the King’s
belated grant of the right to add the eur-de-lys to the Visconti
escutcheon, and to make every eort to obtain his help. Meanwhile,
the rst relay of envoys, sent in early December, had reached
Venice, where they learned of the defeat and were endeavoring to
make their way to the prisoners. Venice, whose interest in
maintaining her trade in the Levant made her the link with the
Moslem world—and something less than a wholehearted combatant
in the crusade—served throughout as the center for news, travel
arrangements, cash, and credit.
In Burgundy and Flanders the Duke’s tax-collectors swarmed
again. Hardly recovered from nancing the crusade, his subjects
were now required to salvage the survivors. The traditional aid for
the lord’s ransom was demanded from every town and county, plus
a contribution from the clergy. The Duke met with bargaining and
resistance and had to accept less than he asked for. The sums were
not cash but payments to be drawn from revenues extending over
months and years. Some were still being levied and disputed three
years later. The cry, “Money! Money!”, wrote Deschamps, resounded
through his lifetime. Now and again, he says, the commoners,
driven to distraction, rise and kill the tax-collectors, then,
astonished by their success, collapse again, to be hounded once
more by nobles with swords and lawyers with documents, crying in
threatening voices, “Sà, de l’argent! Sà, de l’argent!”
In Brusa, Coucy had not fared well. Some accounts say that he fell
into a deep chagrin and melancholy which nothing could lighten,
that he insisted he would never see France again, that after so many
adventures this was destined to be his last. His appraisal was
realistic enough, more likely grounded in physical illness from

wounds or disease in harsh conditions than in “mourning for the
victory of Anti-Christ over the Christians,” as suggested by
L’Alouëte, rst historian of the Coucy dynasty. At 56, he was not
old, even though it is generally considered that old age came early
in the Middle Ages. In fact, while a large proportion of the
population died early, those who lived into their fties and sixties
were not venerable in body and mind nor considered so. Life-
expectancy charts may reect statistics, but not the way people see
themselves. According to an anonymous poem of the mid-14th
century, life’s span was 72 years, consisting of twelve ages
corresponding to the months of the year. At 18, the youth begins to
tremble like March with the approach of spring; at 24, he becomes
amorous as the blossoming of April, and nobility and virtue enter
his soul along with love; at 36, he is at the summer solstice, his
blood as hot as the sun of June; at 42, he has acquired experience;
at 48, he should think of harvesting; at 54, he is in the September of
life when goods should be stored up; age 60, the October of life, is
the onset of old age; 66 is dark November when all green withers
and dies and a man should think on death, for his heirs are waiting
for him to go if he is poor and waiting more eagerly if he is rich; 72
is December, when life is as mournful as winter and there is nothing
left to do but die.
Coucy had led an extraordinarily active life, never at rest, never
pausing after one task before undertaking the next. He showed no
signs of age or slackening when he undertook the crusade nor when
he led the brilliant foray against the Turks on the day before the
battle—the only successful French action of the campaign. Then
came the disaster in a battle launched against his advice, defeat in
an enterprise of which he had been given the guidance, the ghastly
spectacle of his comrades and dependents slaughtered before his
eyes, the shame and hardships of an ignoble captivity, the
remoteness from home, uncertainty of rescue, and fear of a captor
not bound by the rules. As one whose life, though anything but soft,
had been singularly fortunate, Coucy was not conditioned for so
much misfortune. Perhaps he recognized in the Battle of Nicopolis a

profound failure of knighthood, and sensed in its outcome a time to
die.
On February 16, 1397, preparatory to death, he drew up at Brusa
his last will, or, more precisely, a lengthy codicil to a previous will.
By this time he may have been removed from prison to better
quarters under provisional liberty guaranteed by the rich and noble
Francesco Gattilusio, Genoese Lord of Mitylene (Lesbos)—Coucy’s
“relative,” according to Froissart. One of the independent lords of
the Aegean islands called the Archipelago, Gattilusio was a man of
inuence at the Ottoman court who, even without kinship, might
well have given surety for a great French baron well known in
Genoa. The Christian powers of the Archipelago under the shadow
of the advancing Turks were acutely aected by the defeat at
Nicopolis. The blow to the prestige, not to mention to the arms, of
Christianity undermined their position, and the spectacle of
prominent Christian nobles imprisoned and perhaps dying in indel
hands was a disturbing one for them. It was in their interest to
secure a release, and reports of the prisoners’ misery excited their
pity. One merchant of the Archipelago, Nicholas of Aenos, sent a gift
of sh, bread, sugar, and linens from his wife in addition to a loan
of money. One can only hope that, by courtesy of Gattilusio, Coucy
in his last days was not lodged on bare stone.
“Sound of mind but inrm of body, and considering that nothing
is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour,”
Coucy drew up his lengthy codicil in Latin, probably by the hand of
Georey Maupoivre, who was a Master of Arts as well as of
Medicine. In the care and precision and nature of these instructions
and their reection of what was on a man’s mind in his last hours,
there is no better mirror of the Middle Ages.
“First and above all,” he directs burial in France according to the
terms of his previous will (which had specied burial of his body at
Nogent and of his heart at his foundation of Ste. Trinité in Soissons).
At the very end of the codicil, as if reminded of possible diculties
in embalming and transporting the body to France, he charges his
executors with the return of his bones and heart, without fail. At a
time when ocial belief insisted that the body was carrion and the

after-life of the soul all that mattered, the extreme concern shown
for every detail of disposal of the physical remains was remarkable.
Next in importance was Ste. Trinité, his heaviest investment in
salvation. He orders for the monastery “a notable silver cross
weighing forty Paris marks [about 23 pounds], a silver censer, two
cruets for water and wine for use in the Divine service, a silver ewer
for washing the hands of the priest, a ne and notable silver-gilt
chalice of tting weight and workmanship for such a monastery,
four pairs of ornaments for the priest, deacon, and sub-deacon, of
which three shall be for ordinary use and the fourth for the
solemnities of important holy days.”
In the further interest of his soul, bequests follow to no fewer than
21 separate churches and chapels, including Notre Dame de
Chartres, “who, as we rmly believe, made for us a visible miracle.”
The other bequests range from 100 orins for the chapel of Pierre
de Luxemburg at Avignon to 1,000 orins for Notre Dame de Liesse,
where Coucyhad escorted Charles VI after his rst attack of
madness, plus 100 orins each to ve separate chantries in Soissons
for prayers for his soul, and 6,000 to his executors for further
prayers at their discretion. The sum of 1,000 orins was to be
distributed among the poor of Paris, the same to the poor of his own
domain, and 800 bequeathed to the Hôtel Dieu in Paris.
Unlike many nobles concerned with deathbed restitutions, Coucy
evidently had no one he had wronged on his mind, but only some
debts to be fullled. His only possessions at hand—a gown and a
tapestry-are to be sold to pay his servants and to pay Abraham,
“apothecary and merchant of Brusa,” for medicines. Debts incurred
on the voyage are to be paid by means of jewels he has deposited in
Venice. The King of France is asked to hold his lands in France to
ensure that revenues will be collected and used for all legacies he
has directed. Georey Maupoivre and Jacques d’Amance, Marshal of
Lorraine (the duchy of his wife’s family), are named executors,
supplemented by Comte d’Eu, Boucicaut, and Guy de Tremoille for
aid and counsel. These three together with Guillaume de Tremoille,
Jacques de la Marche, and six other French knights witnessed and
signed the document.

Two days later, on February 18, 1397, Enguerrand VII, Sire de
Coucy and Count of Soissons, died in Brusa.
A whole man in a fractured time, he was the least compromised of
his class and kind by brutality, venality, and reckless indulgence.
His fellows have been well described by Clisson’s biographer as “in
turn rened and barbaric, generous and bloody, knavish and
chivalrous, above mankind in their courage and love of glory,
beneath mankind in their hates, their furious follies, their duplicity
and savage cruelty.” Coucy was distinct from most in being
apparently immune from those furious follies. He saw his role
steadily, accepted every responsibility but the constableship,
remained sagacious in judgment, cool and capable in performance.
In that steadiness, sagacity, and competence, and in commanding
the respect and trust of all associates, he had many of the qualities
of George Washington, short of leadership, which needs a cause to
call it forth. If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural
villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born
in unpropitious times. The 14th century produced bourgeois leaders
like the two Van Arteveldes, Etienne Marcel, Cola di Rienzi, but few
from the noble class, partly because leadership was presupposed in
the king, who, until the time of Charles V, personally led the nobles
into battle. When Jean II was in captivity, the northern French
nobles asked Charles of Navarre, because he was a king, to lead
them against the Jacques. The nobility, however, had coherence
only when it was threatened as a class. Otherwise, baronial interests
were too sectional and habits of independence too strong to allow
for a leader, even when the war against the English gradually built
up a cause.
Coucy’s English marriage set him apart during twelve crucial
years. After his repudiation of England, following the death of his
father-in-law, he began to emerge as a leading gure in the
Normandy campaign and could have succeeded Du Guesclin as
Constable if he had wanted to, but no concept of national leadership
attached to that post, no body of public opinion or cohort of
colleagues was asking to be led. The moment of what-might-have-
been passed with the death of Charles V, and under the self-serving

rule of the uncles, national purpose was frittered away. Enguerrand
did not innovate nor rise above his time; he went with it, served it
better than most, and died of its values. It was reduced by his going.
“This Enguerrand VII,” wrote the biographer of Boucicaut, “was
esteemed the seigneur of most merit of his time.”
Coucy’s death was not known in Paris for two months. Robert
d’Esne and, after him, Jacques de Willay learned of it in Venice on
their way east. Still unaware on March 31, Louis d’Orléans in great
solicitude sent a clerk of Coucy’s estate to Turkey with clothing,
having learned of the prisoners’ impoverished condition. In April,
Willay brought back the embalmed heart and body (or bones;
whether the actual body was buried in France has been disputed).
Only then was the Dame de Coucy notied that her husband was
dead. According to the biographer of Boucicaut who tends normally
to rhapsodize, she so bewailed her loss “that it seemed that heart
and life would leave her, and never more did she wish to marry
again, nor allow mourning to depart from her heart.” A funeral of
impressive grandeur was conducted by the Bishops of Noyon and
Laon, the body (or other remains) being buried in an imposing tomb
at Nogent, and the heart at Ste. Trinité, marked by a plaque showing
an engraved heart superimposed over the Coucy arms. Deschamps
wrote a dirge as if for a national event, lamenting “the end and
death of Enguerrand the baron … mourned by every noble heart.”
O St. Lambert, Coucy, La Fère,
Marie, Oisy and St. Gobain,
Weep for your lord, the good seigneur
Who served so well his sovereign
With prowess great in many lands …
Who for the faith in Turkey died.
Let us pray God to pardon him.
In his day bright and beautiful,
Wise, strong, and of great largesse,
A true knight of labor hard

And no repose; in his great house,
He welcomed knights from morn to eve
Who came to join his company.
Preux and bold in Lombardy was he,
He took Arezzo, city of renown,
Made tremble Pavia and Milan.
Let us pray God to pardon him.
Many a heart is sad for him
That none is left to bear his arms.…
The stanzas continue, but, given an erratic meter combined with a
rigid chain of only three rhymes winding through 55 lines, the
charm of this and other 14th century French poetry is limited, and
English, in any case, can do it no justice.
Ransom for the remaining prisoners was nally arranged in June
1397 after prolonged negotiations by the Duke’s ambassadors at the
Sultan’s court. The sum was xed at 200,000 ducats or gold orins,
approximately equal in value to French francs. Burgundy’s
extravagant gifts misred, it was said, convincing Bajazet that
princes who could command such rare and precious things could
pay very highly indeed. All the resources of the banking network
were mobilized, chiey under the direction of Burgundy’s chief
purveyor and banker, Dino Rapondi, a native of Tuscany with
headquarters in Paris and Bruges. So widespread was his commerce
that his name was said to be known wherever there were merchants.
Through him, the King and his uncles acquired precious books, silks,
furs, tapestries, ne linen shirts and handkerchiefs, amber and
unicorn’s horn and other curiosities. Rapondi advised raising the
ransom money from the merchants of the Archipelago, who should
be written to amiably and promised prot on the loans and credit
they could arrange.
Meanwhile, Boucicaut and Guy de Tremoille, released on
provisional liberty to seek funds in the Levant, had reached Rhodes,
where Tremoille, evidently in weakened condition, fell ill and died
at Eastertime. The Knights of Rhodes, anxious like the merchants

about Christian prestige, pawned the plate of their Order to raise
30,000 ducats for a down payment on the ransom. The King of
Cyprus added 15,000, and various merchants and wealthy citizens
of the Archipelago made loans amounting to 30,000. Sigismund had
grandly oered to subscribe half the ransom, but as he was
perennially short of money, the best he could do was assign 7,000
ducats of revenues owed him by Venice. More than half the total
was underwritten on behalf of Burgundy by Gattilusio, Seigneur of
Mitylene.
On a down payment of 75,000, the prisoners were released on
June 24 on their promise to remain in Venice until the entire sum
was paid. One more of their number did not regain liberty. By a
cruel justice, Comte d’Eu died on June 15, nine days before the
release. Bajazet’s farewell to the others was not courtly. Addressing
Jean de Nevers, he said he disdained to ask him for an oath not to
take up arms against him in the future. “Raise what power thou wilt
and spare not, but come against me. Thou shalt nd me ever ready
to receive thee and thy company in the eld in plain battle … for I
am ready to do deeds of arms and ever ready to conquer further into
Christendom.” The Sultan then required the departing crusaders to
witness the spectacle of his hunt conducted by 7,000 falconers and
6,000 huntsmen with hounds in satin blankets and leopards in
diamond collars.
Weakened in health and even more in resources, the crusaders
made no haste to regain France, or even Venice. To travel in
indigence was unthinkable for a Prince of Burgundy. He and his
companions stopped o at Mitylene, Rhodes, and other islands to
rest and recover and borrow money wherever they could. The lady
of Mitylene gave them all new shirts, gowns, and apparel of ne
damask, “every man according to his degree.” The Knights of
Rhodes entertained them for a month. In Venice, which they did not
reach until October, the nancial transactions involving all parties
connected with the crusade were intricate and tremendous. Through
loans and guarantees, enough was collected to make up the ransom
but not enough to go home in style.

Repayment of debts amounting to 100,000 ducats which they had
incurred for living and traveling expenses since their release,
together with the cost of the journey home in appropriate splendor,
required nearly again as much as the ransom. The Duke and
Duchess of Burgundy did not wish their son to travel through
Europe and make his appearance in France looking like a fugitive.
The Duke scraped every resource, to the point of reducing the pay
and pensions of Burgundian ocials, to supply his son with a
magnicent retinue and provide gifts for all concerned. Dino
Rapondi came to Venice with an order on the Duke’s treasury for
150,000 francs and spent the winter arranging transfers of funds, of
which repayment to the merchants of the Archipelago came last.
Three years later the Seigneur of Mitylene was still owed the entire
sum he had loaned, and a three-cornered transaction among
Burgundy, Sigismund, and the Republic of Venice was not settled for
twenty-seven years. These diculties did not inhibit the Duke’s
style of living. In 1399 he bought from Dino Rapondi two
illuminated books for 6,500 francs and, in the next year, two more
for 9,000 and 7,500 apiece.
An outbreak of plague in Venice while the crusaders were there
caused them to remove to Treviso on the mainland, but took
nevertheless the life of one more—Henri de Bar. If the epidemic was
the Black Death, it had come full circle in Coucy’s family, taking
rst his mother and now his son-in-law. It was a sad death so close
to home, and in leaving Marie, who was the primary heir, both
fatherless and a widow, it was to have a sad eect on the Coucy
domain, so long coveted by the royal house.
The crusaders, of whom only Nevers, Boucicaut, Guillaume de
Tremoille, and Jacques de la Marche were left among the leaders,
along with some seven or eight other lords and knights, re-entered
France in February 1398. They were received at the gates of Dijon
with acclamation and gifts of silver presented by the municipality.
In memory of his own captivity, Nevers liberated from the city
prison, “by his own hand,” all whom he found there. Dijon held
solemn services for the dead crusaders, but thereafter the welcome
was all celebration and joy.

In Paris the King gave his cousin a well-considered gift of 20,000
livres. The towns of Burgundy and Flanders vied for the honor of
receiving him. On orders of his father, he made a triumphal progress
to exhibit himself to the people whose taxes had bought his return.
Minstrels preceded him through the gates, fetes and parades greeted
him, more gifts of silver and of wine and sh were presented.
Considering all the bereaved families of Burgundy whose sons did
not return, the receptions probably represented not so much popular
enthusiasm as organized joy, in which the 14th century excelled.
Celebration was required for the prestige of the Duke and his heir,
and the towns were happy enough to cooperate in expectation of the
favors that generally accompanied such joyous occasions. The
magistrates of Tournai expected Nevers’ ceremonial entry to be
graced by a plenary pardon, in which they were disappointed.
In pomp and minstrelsy, the culminating asco of knighthood was
interred. After Nicopolis, nothing went right for France for many
long years. The presiding values of chivalry did not change, but the
system was in its decadence. Froissart found this in England too,
where a friend of former times said to him, “Where are the great
enterprises and valiant men, the glorious battles and conquests?
Where are the knights in England who could do such deeds
now?… The times are changed for the worse.… Now felonies and
hates are nourished here.”
The celebrations for Nevers could not conceal the defeat, and the
moralists found in it reinforcement for pessimism. Mézières
immediately composed an Epistre Lamentable et Consolatoire,
Deschamps a ballade “For the French Fallen at Nicopolis,” Bonet an
allegorical satire in the form of an “Apparition of Master Jean de
Meung,” who appears in a dream to reproach the author for not
protesting the evils that are destroying France and Christendom.
Deschamps states openly that Nicopolis was lost “through pride and
folly,” although he lays some blame upon the Hungarians “who
ed.” Mézières similarly has hard words for the “schismatics,” who,
“for the great hate they bear the Latins,” preferred to be subjects of
the Sultan rather than of the King of Hungary. But essentially he
sees the defeat as the consequence of the crusaders’ lack of the four

moral virtues necessary to any army: order, discipline, obedience,
and justice. In the absence of these, God departs from an army,
which then becomes easily discomted, and this accounts for all the
discomtures since Crécy and Poitiers. Mézières’ call for a new
crusade aroused no response. The Epistre Lamentable was his last
work. Eight years later his scolding and his passion were nally
stilled in death. Like any Isaiah, he grew tiresome, but his yearning
for goodness in society spoke for all the silent people who yearned
for it too but left no record.
Bonet, while including the usual censure of knights for their soft
life and love of capons and ducks, white shirts and ne wines,
comes to something more basic. The knights leave the peasants
behind because they think them “worth nothing,” he writes,
although the poor can endure hardship and coarse food, and, if
armed, would wage a good ght, like the Portuguese peasants who
fought bravely and killed many knights at Aljubarrota. (The
reference is to a battle of 1385 in the same year and with similar
results as the Swiss Battle of Sempach.) While Bonet and others had
often in the past condemned the warrior for robbery and cruelty
toward peasants, they were now ready to condemn chivalry’s
fundamental assumption that military capacity resided in none but
the mounted knight. The chronicler of the Quatre Valois, writing at
about this time, pointed out that the common soldier had been
decisive in certain combats “and for this, poor men should not be
held without honor nor in vile esteem.” He cited a battle of the King
of Cyprus against the Saracens in 1367, in which the day was saved
by action of the sailors who remained to guard the ships, and this
was by the will of Christ, who did not wish Christian chivalry to
perish at the hands of the indels, and moreover “wished to give an
example to nobles.… For our Lord Jesus Christ wants no
grandiloquence or vanity. He wishes victory to be gained by the
common people so that the great should not take vainglory.”
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity
insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than
sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and

glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even
for the sake of success.
The Turkish victory had no immediate eect in Europe because
Bajazet had to turn east against the rise of a erce enemy in Asia.
The rapid conquests of Tamerlane at the head of a revived Mongol-
Turkic horde were comparable, in Gibbon’s large words, “to the
primitive convulsions of nature which agitated and altered the
surface of the globe.” Overrunning Anatolia, leaving a trail of ruined
cities and pyramids of skulls, Tamerlane met and defeated the
Ottoman army at Angora (Ankara) in 1402 and captured the Sultan
alive. Kept in a wagon tted with iron bars, Bajazet was dragged
along on the Mongol path of conquest until he died of misery and
shame—as if history had deliberately arranged a symmetrical
retribution.
Absorbed in its own factions and schisms, Europe failed to seize
the occasion to break the Ottoman hold on the Balkans. Except for a
brave but minor expedition led by Boucicaut—the last trickle of the
crusades—Constantinople could obtain no more help from the West;
Sigismund was embroiled with the Germans and Bohemia; France
and England were each torn by domestic conict. Bajazet’s son held
his own against Tamerlane, the Mongol eruption subsided, Bajazet’s
grandson advanced again in Europe, and in 1453 his great-grandson
Mohammed II conquered Constantinople.
At Coucy, rival ambitions swirled around the great barony with its
castles of grandeur, its 150 towns and villages, its famous forests, its
“many ne ponds, many good vassals,… much great nobility and
inestimable revenues.” Marie de Bar, Coucy’s eldest daughter, and
the Dame de Coucy, his widow, entered into a prolonged contest
over the inheritance, Marie claiming the whole and the Dame de
Coucy claiming half. Neither ceding, they lived in hostility, each in
a separate castle of the domain with her captains and entourage of
relatives, each pursuing lawsuits. At the same time the Célestins of
Ste. Trinité brought a lawsuit against the widow, claiming that she
had failed to carry out Coucy’s last bequests to their monastery.

Meanwhile, Queen Isabeau, still concerned primarily with her
parental family, was trying to promote a marriage between her
father, Stephen of Bavaria, then in Paris as ambassador of the
Empire, and the Dame de Coucy. This raised the prospect of the
strategic domain passing into foreign hands, for it was feared that
Marie might be pressured into allowing the house of Bavaria to take
possession by purchase or otherwise. To frustrate this design, Louis
d’Orléans pressured Marie (by “threats and menaces,” according to
one source) into selling the barony to him, disregarding the widow’s
claims on the ground that the barony was indivisible. Whether his
motive was primarily the interests of France or his personal
aggrandizement vis-à-vis the Duke of Burgundy is an open question.
In any event, he acquired one of the greatest properties of northern
France, which gave him a wedge between his uncle’s two territories
of Burgundy and Flanders. To conrm the patriotic motive, Marie
was persuaded to state in the deed of sale, concluded November 15,
1400, that she “cannot put or transfer [the property] more securely
for the good of the Kingdom of France than in the person of
Monseigneur the Duc d’Orléans.”
The purchase price was 400,000 livres, of which Louis paid only
60,000 down. Marie retained the usufruct of the domain and the use
of the castles of La Fère and Du Châtelet for her residence, but legal
disputes continued after the sale. By some means or other she was
compelled to acquit Louis of 200,000 livres, or half the price, while
the balance of 140,000 on the other half remained unpaid. No less
than eleven lawsuits were brought by Marie against Orléans in an
attempt to recover, before she died suddenly after a wedding feast
in 1405, not without “a suspicion of poison.” Her son Robert de Bar
continued the litigation, both as plainti against Orléans and as
defendant against the Dame de Coucy, who had not, after all,
married Stephen of Bavaria and was still maintaining her dower
rights in the courts. In 1408, after the death of Louis d’Orléans,
Parlement allowed the widow’s claim, but this lapsed a few years
later when her daughter Isabel, who had married the brother of
Jean de Nevers, died without an heir. Meanwhile Charles d’Orléans,
Louis’ son, remained in possession, and when Charles’s son became

King as Louis XII, the barony of Coucy passed, where it had long
been desired, to the crown.
The tormented century sank to a close in keeping with its
character. In March 1398 the Emperor Wenceslas and the King of
France met at Reims in a renewed eort to end the schism of which
they represented opposite sides. Charles VI had been persuaded that
he would never recover from his aiction until the Church was re-
united. To unseat Benedict, the University of Paris had proposed
that France withdraw obedience, but before adopting this radical
measure, one more attempt to obtain mutual abdication by the
popes was to be tried. The assent of the Empire to exert pressure on
Boniface was required, and this was the purpose of the assembly at
Reims. Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one
incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was
not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already
darkening Charles’s mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals
when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk. The Emperor entered the
negotiations in a stupor which he maintained by steady
consumption while vaguely agreeing to anything that was proposed.
When reason entirely deserted Charles, the assembly dispersed.
Persuasions and threats of force were brought to bear on both
popes, and resisted. France resorted to withdrawal of obedience and
even to a siege of the papal palace with Pope Benedict inside, but
neither of these measures succeeded in eectively deposing him,
and the rst caused so much trouble that it had to be rescinded.
Richard II, intent on friendship with France, agreed to demand the
abdication of Boniface, which only succeeded in violently
antagonizing the English, already disaected by the King’s
misgovernment. The citizens of London, partisans of Gloucester,
would now call the King nothing but Richard of Bordeaux (his
birthplace) and were greatly excited against him, saying, “His heart
is so French that he cannot hide it, but a day will come to pay for
all.”

Then happened in England those “great and horrible” events, the
like of which, Froissart felt, had not been seen in all the history he
had recorded. Convinced of plots against him, Richard removed
Gloucester to Calais, where he was strangled with a towel, executed
Arundel, banished Warwick and the Percys, and so aroused the fears
and hates of his subjects that in 1399 his cousin Henry of
Bolingbroke was able to depose him without a sword being raised in
the rightful King’s defense. Compelled publicly to resign the crown,
Richard was transferred from the Tower to a more secluded prison,
where, within a year, he died of purposeful neglect, or worse. The
prop of peaceful relations with France was removed. Bolingbroke
(now Henry IV) talked boldly of abrogating the truce, but
usurpation breeds rebellion and he was too occupied in maintaining
his throne to look for trouble abroad.
With these events, Froissart lost heart. If the sale of Guy de Blois’
property had damaged his ideals, the deposition of the King of
England shocked him profoundly, not for any love of Richard II, but
because the act was subversive of the whole order that sustained his
world. The sixty-odd years of his—and Coucy’s—lifetime, which had
seemed to him a pageant of unending interest and excitement, were
closing in shadow. He glimpsed hollowness and could not continue;
his history breaks o as the century ends.
If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few
at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of
the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of erce and
tragic conicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals,
insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of
dwindling labor for the elds, of cleared land reverting to waste;
and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its
message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.
Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of
wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw o restraints. It
was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their
functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly

than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents
of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual
hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the
Black Death, did not recover. The war of England and France and
the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry’s
military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism
shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep
and pervasive uneasiness. People felt subject to events beyond their
control, swept, like otsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe
without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which
suered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for a
remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never
came.
The times were not static. Loss of condence in the guarantors of
order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force
to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but
rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform,
they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. Marcel
could not impose good government, neither could the Good
Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo
minuto of Florence could not advance their status, the English
peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class
insurrection was crushed.
Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant
movement were the natural consequence of default by the Church.
Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in
strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by
the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that
were to burst the connes of Europe and nd the New World.
Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national
languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year that
Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although
that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the
14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow
worse over the next fty-odd years until at some imperceptible
moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed,

ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and
humanity found itself redirected.

I
Epilogue
n the next fty years, the forces set in motion during the 14th
century played themselves out, some of them in exaggerated
form like human failings in old age. After a heavy recurrence in
the last year of the old century, the Black Death disappeared,
but war and brigandage were renewed, the cult of death grew more
extreme, the struggle to end the schism and reform the abuses of the
Church more desperate. Depopulation reached its lowest point in a
society already weakened both physically and morally.
In France, Jean de Nevers, who had succeeded his father as Duke
of Burgundy in 1404, turned assassin, precipitating a train of evils.
In 1407 he employed a gang of toughs to murder his rival Louis
d’Orléans in the streets of Paris. As Louis was returning to his hotel
after dark, he was set upon by hired killers who cut o his left hand
holding the reins, dragged him from his mule, hacked him to death
with swords, axes, and wooden clubs, and left his body in the gutter
while his mounted escort, which never seems to have been much
use on these occasions, ed.
Protected from penalty by his ducal power, John the Fearless
publicly defended his act, through a spokesman, as justiable
tyrannicide, charging Louis with vice, corruption, sorcery, and a
long list of public and private villainies. Since Louis was associated
in the public mind with the extravagance and license of the court
and with its endless demand for money, John of Burgundy was able
to make himself appear the people’s champion by opposing the
government’s latest tax levy. In the void left by a mad King, the
Duke lled the people’s craving for a royal friend and protector.
Mortal hatreds and implacable conict between Burgundians and
Orléanists consumed France for the next thirty years. Regional and
political groups formed around the antagonists, brigand companies

employed by both sides re-emerged, leaving their smoking tracks of
pillage and massacre. Each side raised the Oriamme against the
other, won and lost control of the helpless King and the capital,
multiplied taxes. Administrative structures fell into disorder, nance
and justice were abused, oces bought and sold, Parlement became
a market place of corruption. The realm, declared an Orléanist
manifesto, was sunk in crime and sin with God blasphemed
everywhere, “even by churchmen and children.”
The middle class rose in the same eort to oust corrupt ocials
and establish measures of good government as Etienne Marcel had
led more than fty years before—and with no more success.
Impatient for immediate results, a turbulent collection of the
butchers, skinners, and tanners of Paris, called Cabochiens after
their leader Caboche, broke into erce revolt, reproducing the revolt
of the Maillotins with increased brutality. Inevitably the bourgeois
reacted against them and opened the gates to the Orléanist party
which suppressed the revolt, restored venal ocials, canceled the
reforms and persecuted the reformers. John of Burgundy, who had
judiciously removed himself during the violence, was declared a
rebel and, following the old pattern of Charles of Navarre, entered
into alliance with the English.
Henry IV of England, after continuous struggle against Welsh
revolt, baronial antagonists, and a son impatient for the crown, died
in 1413, to be succeeded by the said son who at 25 was prepared,
with all the sanctimonious energy of a reformed rake, to enter upon
a reign of stern virtue and heroic conquest. Relying on the anarchy
in France and his arrangements with the Duke of Burgundy, and
hoping by military successes to unite the English behind the house
of Lancaster, Henry V took up the old war and the threadbare claim
to the French crown which had not gained in validity by passing to
him through a usurper. On the pretext of various French perdies,
he invaded France in 1415 in Mars’s favorite month of August,
announcing that he had come “into his own land, his own country,
and his own kingdom.” After the siege and capture of Hareur in
Normandy, he marched north for Calais to return home for the

winter. About thirty miles short of his goal, not far from the
battleeld of Crécy, he met the French army at Agincourt.
The Battle of Agincourt has inspired books and studies and
acionados, but it was not decisive in the sense of Crécy, which, by
leading to the capture of Calais, transformed Edward Ill’s semi-
serious adventure into a hundred years’ war, nor in the sense of
Poitiers, which determined the loss of condence in the noble as
knight. Agincourt merely conrmed both these results, especially
the second, for not even Nicopolis was so painful a demonstration
that valor in combat is not the equivalent of competence in war. The
battle was lost by the incompetence of French chivalry, and won
more by the action of the English common soldiers than of the
mounted knights.
Although Burgundy and his vassals held aloof, the French army
that assembled to confront the invaders outnumbered them by three
or four to one, and was as overcondent as ever. The Constable,
Charles d’Albret, rejected an oer of 6,000 crossbowmen from the
citizen militia of Paris. No change in tactics had been introduced,
and the only technological development (except for cannon, which
played no role in open battle) was heavier plate armor. Intended to
give added protection against arrows, it had the eect of increasing
fatigue and reducing mobility and play of the sword arm. The
terrible worm in his iron cocoon was less terrible than before, and
the cocoon itself sometimes lethal; knights occasionally died of
heart failure inside it. Pages had to support their lords on the eld
lest, should they fall, they be unable to rise again.
The armies met in a conned space between two clumps of
woods. Rain fell throughout the night while they waited to do battle
and while the French pages and grooms, walking the horses up and
down, churned the ground into a soft mud exactly suited for the
slipping and stumbling of steel-clad knights. The French had not
attempted to select a battleground where their superiority in
numbers could be eectively deployed, with the result that they
were drawn up for battle in three rows, one behind the other, with
little room for action on the anks, and forced to follow each other
into the valley of mud. With no commander-in-chief able to impose

a tactical plan, the nobles vied for the glory of a place in the front
line until it was as compacted as the Flemish line at Roosebeke.
Archers and crossbowmen were placed behind, where their missiles
could not dilute the glory of the clash and were in fact useless.
The English, though tired, hungry, and dispirited by their
numerical inferiority, had two advantages: a King in personal
command and a disproportion of about 1,000 knights and squires to
6,000 archers and a few thousand other foot. Their archers were
deployed in solid wedges between the men-at-arms and in blocks on
the wings. Wearing no armor, they were fully mobile, and in
addition to their bows, they carried a variety of axes, hatchets,
hammers, and, in some cases, large swords hanging from their belts.
Under these conditions the outcome was more one-sided than any
since the start of the war. In their overcrowding, the dismounted
knights of the French front line could barely wield their great
weapons and, hampered by the mud, fell into helpless disarray,
which, when merging with the advance of the second line and
tangled by ight, panic, and riderless horses, quickly became chaos.
Grasping the situation, the English archers threw down their bows
and rushed in with their axes and other weapons to an orgy of
slaughter. Many of the French, impeded by their heavy armor, could
not defend themselves, accounting for the several thousands killed
and taken prisoner in contrast to a total English loss of 500,
including at least one victim of probable heart failure. This was
Edward Duke of York, one of Edward Ill’s grandsons, who was 45
and fat and found dead on the battleeld without a wound. On the
French side, three dukes, ve counts, ninety barons and many others
were killed, among them two of Coucy’s family—his grandson
Robert de Bar, and his third son-in-law, Philip Count of Nevers who
fought in spite of his elder brother, the Duke of Burgundy. The list
of prisoners was headed by Charles d’Orléans, the new lord of
Coucy, who was to remain a captive for 25 years. Chivalry’s hero,
Marshal Boucicaut, too, was captured. Bungled Agincourt was his
last combat; he died in England six years later.
After two years’ pause, Henry V returned for the systematic
conquest of territory. Improved technology in the use of gunpowder

and artillery now made the dierence, costing walled cities their
immunity. As the era of the sword was ending, that of rearms
began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity. In
three years, 1417–19, Henry took possession of all Normandy while
the French twisted and grappled in internal feuds. Two successive
Dauphins died within a year of each other, leaving Charles, a
hapless fourteen-year-old whom his mother pronounced illegitimate,
as heir to the throne. The Cabochiens rose again in a rampage of
savagery and murder. John the Fearless took control of the King and
capital, while the Dauphin escaped below the Loire. Through a
France divided against itself, Henry V hammered his advance. In the
course of the English siege of Rouen, the defenders, to save food,
expelled 12,000 citizens whom the English refused to let through
their lines and who remained between the two camps in winter,
subsisting on grass and roots or dying of cold and starvation. When
the fall of Rouen posed a direct threat to Paris, the French factions
were frightened into an attempt to close ranks against the enemy.
In 1419, after much stalling by the Duke of Burgundy, a meeting
was arranged between him and the Dauphin to take place on the
bridge at Montereau, about 35 miles southeast of Paris. The parties
advanced toward each other lled with suspicion, harsh words were
spoken as if the gods of Troy were again whispering evil, hands ew
to swords, and as the Dauphin backed away from the scene, his
followers fell upon the Duke, plunged their weapons in his body,
and “dashed him down stark dead to the ground.” Louis d’Orléans
was avenged, but at bitter cost.
Reconciliation was broken o. Swearing revenge in his turn,
Philip of Burgundy, the new Duke, entered into full alliance with
Henry V, even recognizing his shopworn claim to the crown of
Philip’s own ancestors. Together they drew up the Treaty of Troyes
between the King of England and the still living wraith of the King
of France. By its terms, signed in 1420, the witless King and his
foreign-born Queen, who never felt French, disowned the “so-called
Dauphin” and accepted Henry V as successor to the throne of France
and husband of their daughter Catherine. During Charles VI’s
lifetime Henry was conrmed in possession of Normandy and his

other territorial conquests and was to share the government of
France with the Duke of Burgundy.
The integrity of France had reached its lowest point. If a king had
been captured at Poitiers, kingship itself was surrendered at Troyes.
France the supreme was reduced to an Anglo-Burgundian
condominium. Henry V’s quick ve-year campaign alone had not
accomplished this: it was the work of a hundred years of
disintegrating forces combined with the rise of the Burgundian state
and the accident of the King’s long-lived madness. But at this stage
in the development of nationalism it was not a conquest that could
succeed, no matter how careful the methods of Henry V. If a sense
of Frenchness was already too strong to accept the transfers of
sovereignty in 1360, it was that much stronger two generations
later, as the parties to the Treaty of Troyes were clearly aware. They
included a clause forbidding anyone to voice disapproval of the
treaty and making such disapproval an act of treason.
There was, however, an occupied France and a free France below
the Loire. The wretched Dauphin, with what stamina he possessed,
refused to accept the treaty and retreated with his Council to
Bourges in Berry, where he maintained a feeble heartbeat of the
crown. After making a royal entry into Paris, Henry V returned
home, leaving his brother, the Duke of Bedford, as his regent in
France. History, or whatever deus ex machina arranges the aairs of
men, indulges an occasional taste for irony. Less than two years
later Charles VI and Henry V died within a month of each other, the
son-in-law rst so that he never wore the French crown. The claim
passed to his nine-month-old son, and with it, through Catherine of
France, the Valois curse. Madness was to overcome Henry VI as a
grown man; the Dauphin, subsequently Charles VII, being
illegitimate, escaped.
Once again it was said, “The forests came back with the English,”
as war and pestilence emptied the land. In Picardy, the invaders’
perennial pathway, villages were left in blackened ruin, elds were
uncultivated, disused roads vanished under brambles and weeds,
unpeopled lands lay solitary where no cockcrow was heard. In the
outskirts of Abbeville, a starving peasant woman was found who

had salted down the bodies of two children she had killed.
Destruction spread as the English pursued a serious eort to make
good the conquest of France. Only the alliance of Burgundy and the
exhaustion of a marauded and trampled country enabled them to
take hold. No armed force, wrote Charles d’Orléans’ secretary, could
take the castle of Coucy during the wars, but by “interior treason” it
was delivered for a time to the enemy and its beautiful chapel
windows were “in large part stripped by profane hands.”
Peasants ed the countryside to take refuge in the towns, where
they hoped to nd security and where they imagined people led a
better life. In urban alleys and hovels they found the unskilled
laboring class no better o than themselves. Among the
overcrowded and undernourished, epidemics took a greater toll, and
a weakened population became more vulnerable to typhus and
leprosy as well as plague. Declining trade and manufacture created
unemployment and fostered hostility to the refugees. Some returned
to the land to try to rebuild their villages and re-cultivate
overgrown elds, some to live in the woods by trapping and shing.
Statues of St. Roch and other saints invoked against plague and
various forms of sudden death multiplied in the churches; the
fashion for naked, skeletal egies spread. Now in the 15th century
the cult of death ourished at its most morbid. Artists dwelt on
physical rot in ghoulish detail: worms wriggled through every
corpse, bloated toads sat on dead eyeballs. A mocking, beckoning,
gleeful Death led the parade of the Danse Macabre around
innumerable frescoed walls. A literature of dying expressed itself in
popular treatises on Ars Moriendi, the Art of Dying, with scenes of
the deathbed, doctors and notaries in attendance, hovering families,
shrouds and cons, grave-diggers whose spades uproot the bones of
earlier dead, nally the naked corpse awaiting God’s judgment
while angels and vicious black devils dispute for his soul.
The staging of plays and mysteries went to extremes of the horrid,
as if people needed ever more excess to experience a thrill of
disgust. The rape of virgins was enacted with startling realism; in
realistic dummies the body of Christ was viciously cut and hacked
by the soldiers, or a child was roasted and eaten by its mother. In a

15th century version of the favorite Nero-Agrippina scene, the
mother pleads for mercy, but the Emperor, as he orders her belly
sliced open, demands to see “the place where women receive the
semen from which they conceive their children.”
Associated with the cult of death was the expected end of the
world. The pessimism of the 14th century grew in the 15th to the
belief that man was becoming worse, an indication of the
approaching end. As described in one French treatise, a sign of this
decline was the congealing of charity in human hearts, indicating
that the human soul was aging and that the ame of love which
used to warm mankind was sinking low and would soon go out.
Plague, violence, and natural catastrophes were further signals.
With the English occupying the capital, courage had sunk low.
Frenchmen did not lack who were ready to accept union under one
crown as the only solution to incessant war and economic ruin. In
most, however, resistance to the English tyrants and “Goddams,” as
they were called, was axiomatic, but it was uncoordinated and
leaderless. The Dauphin was weak and spiritless, captive of
unscrupulous or passive ministers. Unheralded, the courage came
from society’s most unlikely source—a woman of the commoners’
class.
The phenomenon of Jeanne d’Arc—the voices from God who told
her she must expel the English and have the Dauphin crowned King,
the quality that dominated those who would normally have despised
her, the strength that raised the siege of Orléans and carried the
Dauphin to Reims—belongs to no category. Perhaps it can only be
explained as the answer called forth by an exigent historic need. The
moment required her and she rose. Her strength came from the fact
that in her were combined for the rst time the old religious faith
and the new force of patriotism. God spoke to her through the
voices of St. Catherine, St. Michael, and St. Margaret, but what He
commanded was not chastity nor humility nor the life of the spirit
but political action to rescue her country from foreign tyrants.
The ight of her meteor lasted only three years. She appeared in
1428, inspired Dunois, bastard son of Louis d’Orléans, and others of
the Dauphin’s circle to attack at Orléans, delivered the city in May

1429, and, on the wave of that victory, led Charles to the sacred
ceremony of coronation at Reims two months later. Captured by the
Burgundians at Compiègne in May 1430, she was sold to the
English, tried as a heretic by the Church in the service of the
English, and burned at the stake at Rouen in May 1431. Her
condemnation was essential to the English because she claimed to
have been moved by God, and if the claim were not disallowed,
God, the arbiter in the aairs of men, would have been shown to
have set His face against the English dominion of France. All the
intensity and relentlessness of the inquisitors was pitted against her
to prove the invalidity of her voices. Before the trial, neither Charles
VII, who owed her his crown, nor any of the French made any eort
to ransom or save her, possibly from nobility’s embarrassment at
having been led to victory by a village girl.
Jeanne d’Arc’s life and death did not instantly generate a national
resistance; nevertheless, the English thereafter were ghting a losing
cause, whether they knew it or not. The Burgundians knew it. The
installation of Charles as anointed King of France, with a re-inspired
army, changed the situation, the more so as the English were
distracted by rising frictions under an infant King. Recognizing the
implications, the Duke of Burgundy gradually went over to the
French, came to terms with Charles VII, and sealed an alliance by
the Peace of Arras in 1435. Within a year, by action of an energetic
new Constable, Paris was regained for the King, a signal to the
realm of re-unication to come. No one could have said that the
spark lit by the Maid of Orléans had become a ame, for her
signicance is better known to history than it was to
contemporaries, but renewed hope and energy was in the air. The
war did not end, and in fact grew more brutal as the English, out of
the obstinacy that overtakes conquerors when the conquered refuse
to succumb, persisted in an eort which the Burgundian defection
from their cause had made hopeless.
All this time the dominant intellectual eort of Europe was
engaged in continuous, contentious, and intense activity to end the

papal schism and bring about reform within the Church. Both aims
depended on establishing the supremacy of a Council over the
papacy. As long as both popes persistently refused to abdicate, an
agreed-upon ending of the schism was impossible, leaving a Council
the only alternative. It was equally apparent that no Pope and
College of Cardinals would override vested interests to initiate
reform from within; therefore, only by establishing the authority of
a Council could an instrument of reform be obtained. Serious
theologians struggled seriously with these problems in a genuine
eort to eect change and nd a way to limit and constitutionalize
the powers of the papacy. The issues aroused the ercest
philosophical and religious, not to say material, controversies,
which were debated through a succession of Councils over a period
of forty years. Summoned not from the center of the Church but
from the circumference, by universities, sovereigns, and states, the
Councils met at Pisa, Constance, and Basle.
At Pisa in 1409 the reform issue, eloquently sponsored by d’Ailly
and Gerson, was suppressed while all energies were engaged in
deposing both the Avignon and Roman popes and electing a single
successor. This individual promptly died, to be replaced by a martial
Italian, Baldassare Cossa, more condottiere than cardinal, who took
the name of John XXIII. Since his two rival predecessors still clung
to their Sees, the schism was now triple. In France’s diculties, the
initiative passed to Emperor Sigismund, who summoned the
memorable Council that met at Constance on imperial territory from
1414 to 1418.
With historic consequence for the Church, Constance took upon
itself a third issue, the suppression of heresy, meaning all the
dissident strains which had risen out of the malaise of the last
century. Vitality in religion had passed to the dissidents, mystics,
and reformers, and, in a negative sense, to practices of sorcery and
witchcraft, although the emphasis on sorcery reected accusations
by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being
threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.
Denunciations, trials, and burnings increased, and in its tortures of

supposed heretics the Inquisition was as savage and ingenious in
cruelty as any indel Turk or Chinese. Witch-hunting was to reach
epidemic proportions in the second half of the century, marked by
the famous treatise Malleus Malecarum of 1487, an encyclopedia
for the detection of demonology and its devotees.
Constance was concerned with the more fundamental heresy of
Jan Hus, ideologically the successor of Wyclif. Summoned to explain
and defend his doctrines at Constance, he was condemned and
burned at the stake in 1415. He might well have claimed,
anticipating Bishop Latimer, that the ames in which he died lit the
candle that would not be put out.
The Council also managed after a series of dramatic struggles with
John XXIII, to depose him on charges of piracy, murder, rape,
sodomy, and incest (of which Gibbon remarks that the “most
scandalous” charges were suppressed) and elect Cardinal Colonna of
Rome as Martin V. The previous Roman Pope having been induced
to resign, and the still obstinate Benedict of Avignon being
eectively isolated, the schism was declared closed, although it was
to revive briey over the issue of reform. The greater struggle
between Council and papacy for supremacy remained. Under Martin
V, the Papal States and their revenues were recovered, and the
material, if not spiritual, gain in strength enabled the papacy under
Martin’s successor, Eugenius IV, to renew the conciliar contest at the
Council of Basle. Like some wrestle of giants, this Council lasted for
eighteen years.
Doctrinal controversies raged, groups seceded, rump councils
convened, a rival Pope—no less than the reigning Count of Savoy,
who could pay his own way—was elected as Felix V. Reforms and
restrictions on the papacy were voted by one side and rejected by
the other, while states and sovereigns were again divided by power
politics. In the end, the reformers were defeated, Felix V resigned,
and the Council of Basle was dissolved in 1449. The papacy, rmly
Italian once more, acknowledged conciliar supremacy on paper but
regained its primacy in fact. Its triumph, celebrated at the Jubilee of
1450, proved a phantom. The papacy was never again to be what it
had been before the schism and the Councils. It had lost prestige in

the rst of these crises, and inuence and control over the national
churches in the second. In an expression of “Gallican liberties,” a
French synod in 1438 adopted reforms independently and restricted
papal taxation of the French clergy. Movements and ideas generated
by the conciliar struggle were moving ineluctably toward the
Protestant secession.
Change in another sphere was registered in the Hussite wars, a
movement red by Czech nationalism and religious zeal to avenge
the death of Hus. Its members were largely bourgeois and peasants
(with some ambivalent support from the Czech nobility) and in their
struggle against the warrior class, it was the bourgeois, not their
opponents, who developed a new military tactic. They adopted the
device of a “moving fort,” consisting of a square or circle of baggage
wagons chained together for defense against the charge of mounted
horsemen. Squads armed with pikes, hand-held guns, and ails
protected each gap between the wagons, and as success in defense
led to the oense, the squads charged through these gaps against
the enemy. In 1420 they defeated the forces led by Sigismund in a
“crusade” to reestablish orthodoxy and, gaining condence from the
fear they inspired, undertook raids into Hungary, Bavaria, and
Prussia as far as the Baltic, raising the prospect of a dominion of
heresy. They red cannon from within the wagon square and were
the rst force to make hand-held rearms a major weapon. By the
end of ten years a third of the Hussite force possessed these
weapons.
Being human, they were aicted with ideological conict
between moderates and radicals which ultimately broke their
movement from within. At the Council of Basle, however, they were
strong enough to compel the Church for the rst time to conclude a
treaty of peace with heretics. Like the Swiss, also largely an army of
the non-noble class, they had learned to ght eectively because
they were not wedded to glory nor bound to the horse.

During the 1420s and ’30s, Henry the Navigator, Prince of
Portugal and grandson of John of Gaunt, launched annual voyages
into the Atlantic, exploring and claiming the Azores, Madeiras, and
Canaries, and venturing down the west coast of Africa until the
great western bulge was rounded in 1433 and the coasts of gold and
ivory reached for the opening of new trade. Even if Prince Henry’s
initial motive was for the greater glory of the Order of Christ, of
which he was General, his work and its impulse were modern. He
took his place on the bridge between medieval and modern, where
the humanists and scientists were crowding.
Change was uneven and erratic. The population of Europe had
sunk to its lowest point by about 1440 and was not to rise for
another thirty years. Rouen, which had a population of 15,000
before the Black Death, numbered only 6,000 citizens in the mid-
15th century. The Cathedral of Schleswig, which made a comparison
of its revenues of 1457 with those of 1352, found that rents and
measures of barley, rye, and wheat were each down to about one
third of what they had been. In many places, elementary schools
had disappeared, not to return until modern times. In 1439 the
Bourgeois of Paris, who kept a journal in these years, reported grass
growing in the streets of the capital, and wolves attacking people in
the half-populated suburbs. In the same year the Archbishop of
Bordeaux complained that, owing to the curse of the écorcheurs,
students could no longer seek the pearl of knowledge at universities,
for “many have been taken on the way, imprisoned, stript of their
books and goods and sometimes, alas! slain.” The cost of a hundred
years of war in aids and subsidies, poll taxes and indirect taxes and
devalued currency was incalculable. Yet the forced summoning of so
many Estates and parliaments for grant of funds may have
strengthened the functioning of representative bodies even while the
nancial burden caused misery and class antagonism.
Few in the rst decade under Charles VII could see signs of
progress ahead. Through continual wars, civil and foreign, wrote
Thomas Basin, a Norman chronicler of the reign, through the
“negligence and idleness” of the King’s ocials, the “greed and

slackness” of men-at-arms and the lack of military discipline,
devastation reigned from Rouen to Paris, from the Loire to the
Seine, over the plains of Brie and Champagne, and from the Seine as
far as Laon, Amiens, and Abbeville. “And it was feared that the
marks of this devastation would long endure and remain visible
unless Divine Providence kept better watch over the things of this
world.”
Slowly, improbably, the tasks of ruling made a King of Charles
VII, and better fortune brought better men into his service. The
great bourgeois nancier Jacques Coeur supplied a footing of money
and credit, and siege artillery perfected by skilled gunners outside
the ranks of chivalry broke the English hold on castles and towns
with an ecacy unknown in the 14th century. Town after town
opened its gates to the King’s forces, the more readily because
Charles VII accomplished at last the fundamental military reform
that had defeated his grandfather Charles V. In 1444–45 he
succeeded in establishing a standing army, incorporating and at the
same time eliminating the lawless companies, the greatest scourge
of the time. Under the new law, twenty compagnies d’ordonnance of
100 lances each were established, with two archers, a squire, a
page, and a valet de guerre for each lancer, making a total of 600 per
company. Ocered by the most reliable of the mercenary captains,
who recruited their own men, the new companies were paid and
provisioned by the crown by means of regular annual taxation, and
were quartered at strategic points throughout France. By relentless
eort, the remaining écorcheurs were disbanded. Among signs of
change at mid-century, none was more important than this
innovation of the standing army. What it signied was a principle of
order where all before—plague, war, and schism–had been agents of
disorder.
Recovery was aided by England’s fading will for conquest. Henry
VI, as an adult, wanted peace. A feeble, uncertain King, he was the
pawn of quarreling cabals among the barons and prelates. His
competent uncle, the Duke of Bedford, was dead, leaving no one of
outstanding status able to lead or terminate the war. By 1450 the
French had recovered all of Normandy; towns surrendered as soon

as the artillery train appeared. Even English Aquitaine had dwindled
to little more than the environs of Bordeaux.
In 1453 at Castillon, the only remaining English foothold outside
Bordeaux, the last battle was fought. Traditional roles were
reversed, with foolhardy valor on the English side and bourgeois
competence on the French. Castillon having surrendered to the
French, Lord John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, set out from
Bordeaux to recapture it. According to Basin, he was habitually
given to “impetuous daring rather than deliberate assault,” and
insisted, against the advice of an experienced lieutenant, on a
frontal attack at the head of his mounted men-at-arms. The French,
under the guidance of “a certain Jean Bureau, citizen of Paris, a
man of small stature but of purpose and daring, particularly skilled
and experienced in the use of [artillery],” had defended their camp
by a ditch, a wall of earth reinforced by tree trunks, and “machines
of war”—culverins, serpentines, arbalests, and various launchers of
projectiles. Talbot and his knights threw themselves against these
defenses and were repulsed by stones, lead, and missiles of every
description. Talbot was killed and his army routed. Bordeaux itself
fell soon after. Nothing was left of England’s continental empire
except Calais and an empty claim to the French crown.
The longest war was over, though perhaps few were aware of it.
After so many truces and renewals, who could have realized that the
end had come? Without ceremony or cease-re, treaty or settlement,
the adventure and agony of ve generations faded away. National
identities were formed by its passage. The Hundred Years’ War, like
the crises of the Church in the same period, broke apart medieval
unity. The brotherhood of chivalry was severed, just as the
internationalism of the universities, under the combined eect of
war and schism, could not survive. Between England and France the
war left a legacy of mutual antagonism that was to last until
necessity required alliance on the eve of 1914.
In the same year as Castillon, madness overtook Henry VI,
precipitating the same contest for control of the Englich crown that
had so damaged France. Unemployed soldiers and archers returning
to England took service with the baronial factions, adding their

violence and weapons to the civil Wars of the Roses that now took
the place of the war in France. In the same fateful year of 1453 the
formidable defenses of Constantinople fell before the siege guns of
Mahomet II. The Turks brought a siege train of seventy pieces of
artillery headed by a super-bombard hooped with iron, drawn by
sixty oxen and capable of launching cannonballs weighing 800
pounds. The fall of Byzantium has supplied a conventional date for
the close of the Middle Ages, but an event more pregnant with
change took place at the same time.
In 1453–54 the rst document printed from movable type was
produced by Gutenberg at Mainz, followed in 1456 by the rst
printed book, the Vulgate Bible. “The Gothic sun,” as Victor Hugo
put it with tting grandiloquence, “set behind the gigantic printing
press of Mainz.” The new means of disseminating knowledge and
exchange of ideas spread with unmedieval rapidity. Printing presses
appeared in Rome, Milan, Florence, and Naples within the next
decade, and in Paris, Lyon, Bruges, and Valencia in the 1470s. The
rst music was printed in 1473. William Caxton set up his printing
press at Westminster in 1476 and published that still unsurpassed
work of English prose, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, in 1484.
With the Tudors on the English throne, a formal settlement
between England and France was eventually concluded by the
Treaty of Etaples in 1492, a year more signicant for other reasons.
The energies of Europe that had once found vent in the crusades
were now to nd it in voyages, discoveries, and settlements in the
New World.
The Coucy lineage, after the death of Enguerrand VII, hung by the
single thread of Marie’s son Robert de Bar. Philippa died without
issue. Isabel, ospring of Coucy’s second marriage, died in 1411,
followed or predeceased within six months by her only child, an
infant daughter. Perceval, the Bastard of Coucy, left a will in 1437
leaving his seigneurie to the husband of Robert de Bar’s daughter,
from which it may be presumed that the only son of Enguerrand VII
died without issue. Yet the single thread was to lead to a King.

Robert de Bar’s daughter Jeanne married Louis de Luxemburg,
Constable of France, and in her turn bore a daughter who married a
Bourbon of the branch descended from St. Louis. The grandson of
this marriage, Antoine de Bourbon, married Jeanne d’Albret, Queen
of Navarre, and the son of their marriage, with his white plume of
Navarre and his famous concession—“Paris is worth a mass”—
reached the throne as Henri IV. Courageous, quick-witted, amorous,
reasonable, he was the most popular of all French Kings and—
perhaps owing to a few genes from Enguerrand VII—a rational man.
The great barony of Coucy, after being united with the royal
domain under Louis XII, son of Charles d’Orléans, remained the
property of the Orléans branch of the royal house. During the
minority of Louis XIV—whose brother Philippe d’Orléans carried the
title Sire de Coucy—the formidable castle, originally built to
overawe kings, became a focus of the Fronde, the league of nobles
opposed to Cardinal Mazarin, the Regent. To destroy a base of his
enemies, Mazarin in 1652 blew up parts of the castle, rendering it
uninhabitable, though his means were inadequate to bring down the
titanic donjon. An earthquake in 1692 shattered more of the castle
and left a jagged crack from top to bottom of the donjon, but it still
stood, guardian over the empty halls below. One hundred years
later the barony’s last seigneur was the Duc d’Orléans, called
Philippe Egalité, who, as a member of the National Convention,
voted for the death of Louis XVI and was himself a victim of the
guillotine a year later. His property, including Coucy, passed to the
state.
Meanwhile Enguerrand’s Célestin monastery at Villeneuve de
Soissons had been vandalized by the Huguenots, restored and ruined
again in the battles of the Fronde, and sold as a private château
when the Célestin Order was suppressed in 1781. Sacked during the
Revolution, it passed through several hands until purchased by
Count Olivier de la Rochefoucauld in 1861. Coucy’s grasp at
perpetuity was no more successful than most.
Under Napoleon III, the Commission of Historical Monuments
recommended restoration of the castle of Coucy and, short of that,

urgent work to prevent deterioration of the keep from the ravages of
decay. The choice for restoration lay between Coucy and
Pierrefonds, a later and more luxurious castle built in the late 14th
century by Louis d’Orléans. Because Coucy would have cost three
times as much to restore and Pierrefonds was preferred by the
Empress Eugénie as being nearer to Paris, the choice went to the
latter. Sadly, the architect Viollet-le-Duc, restorer of the medieval,
turned away from the major military structure of the Middle Ages.
“Beside this giant, the greatest towers known are but spindles,” he
wrote. All he could do was encircle the giant by two belts of iron,
repair the roof and major cracks, and install a custodian to prevent
further thefts of the castle’s fallen stones.
Silent, deserted, inhabited by owls, the great landmark still
inspired awe. Tourists came to gaze, archeologists to study its
structure, artists to draw its plans and monuments. Life went on in
the village at its base and along the road winding down the hill and
through the valley to Soissons. The donjon was impervious to time,
to the disorders of man and the disorders of nature, but not to those
of the 20th century.
In 1917 Picardy, invaded once more, had been occupied for three
years by the German army. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria,
commander of the Sixth Army, urged General Ludendor, Chief of
General Sta, to ensure that the castle of Coucy be spared as a
unique architectural treasure of no current military value. Neither
side, he pointed out, had attempted to use it for military purposes,
and its destruction “would only mean a blow to our own prestige
quite uselessly.” Ludendor did not like appeals to culture. Coucy
having been unwisely called to his attention, he decided to make it
an example of superior values. Rammed with 28 tons of explosives
at his orders, the colossus raised by Enguerrand III in the age of the
greatest builders since Greece and Rome was dynamited to the
ground.
The outer walls, foundations, underground chambers and tunnels,
portions of inner walls and doorways survive over acres of tumbled
stones. Above a cracked lintel the unarmored knight still engages a
lion in combat. For 700 years the castle had witnessed cycles of

human endeavor and failure, order and disorder, greatness and
decline. Its ruins remain on the hilltop in Picardy, silent observers as
history’s wheel turns.

Bibliography
I. MATERIAL RELATING SPECIFICALLY TO COUCY
A. MANUSCRIPTS AND SEALS
B. PUBLISHED WORKS
II. GENERAL
A. PRIMARY SOURCES
B. SECONDARY WORKS
ABBREVIATIONS
AESC Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations
BEC Bibliothèque de l’Ecole de Chartes
BN Bibliothèque nationale
Ec HR Economic History Review
EHR English Historical Review
REH Revue des études historiques
RH Revue historique
RQH Revue des questions historiques
SHF Société de l’histoire de France
TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
I. ON COUCY

A. MANUSCRIPTS
Archives du département de l’Aisne
H 325, folio 239: Cartulaire-chronique de l’Abbaye de Nogent-sous-Coucy. (Modern
copy in Bib. de la ville de Noyon, Coll. Peigne-Delacourt, ms. 21.)
H 721: Fondation du couvent des Célestins à Villeneuve-les-Soissons.
Bibliothèque nationale, Paris
Fonds français, nouv. acq., Coll. Bastard d’Estang, 3653–4–5, 3638–9.
Coll. Clairembault, vol. 35, nos. 74–114; vol. 39, no. 81, dossier Coucy.
Pièces originales, 875, dossier Coucy, nos. 1–37.
Mss. Coll. Picardie, vol. x, fo. 207 .
Ms. fr. 18616, folios 94–141. Mémoires pour faire servir à l’histoire des seigneurs de
Coucy. (Not an original work, this is a 16th century compilation of material
drawn from L’Alouëte, Duchesne, and other sources.)
Ms. Latin 5149, Historia monasterii SS Trinitatis Caelestìnorum.
Ecole de chartes
Lacaille, Henri, Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation
of 1890. The author’s list of pièces justicatives—his sources—is unfortunately
missing from the ms.) Cited in Notes as Lacaille, thèse.
SEALS
Archives nationales—Bureaux des sceaux
Coll. Clairembault, nos. 2838, 2841–2, 8644–6.
Coll. de la Flandre, no. 308.
Bibliothèque nationale—Cabinet des Médailles
Coll. Bastard d’Estang, nos. 28–28bis.

B. PUBLISHED WORKS
† indicates a primary source for the life of Enguerrand VII
†† indicates publication of primary documents
†L’ALOUËTE, FRANÇOIS DE, Traité des nobles avec une histoire généalogique de la très-
illustre et très ancienne maison de Couci et de ses alliances. Paris, 1577.
ANCIEN, BERNARD, “Les Couleurs d’Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy et Comte de
Soissons.” Mémoire de la fédération des sociétés d’histoire et d’archéologie de
l’Aisne, vol. IX, 1963.
L’Art de vérier les dates des faits historiques, par un Religieux de la Congrégation
de St.-Maur, vol. XII. Paris, 1818.
††BARDY, HENRI, Enguerrand de Coucy et les Grands Bretons. Paris, 1860.
BELLOY, M. DE, Mémoires historiques: 1, Sur la maison de Coucy encore existante.
Paris, 1770.
BOUET, M. G., “Excursions à Noyon, à Laon et à Soissons.” Bull, monumental sur les
monuments historiques de la France, 4th series, vol. IV.
††BROCHE, LUCIEN, “Notes sur d’anciens comptes de la châtellenie de Coucy.” Bull, de
la Société académique de Laon, vol. XXXII, 1905–9.
CHAURAND, JACQUES, Thomas de Marle, Sire de Coucy. Vervins, 1963.
††DELAVILLE LE Roux, J., “Le Legs d’Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy, à la Cathédrale de
Chartres.” Mémoires de la Société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loire, vol. IX, 1889.
†DUCHESNE, ANDRÉ, Histoire généalogique des maisons de Guînes, d’Ardres, de Gand et
de Coucy. Paris, 1631.
DUFOUR, ETIENNE, Coucy-le-Château et ses environs. Soissons, 1910.
DUPLESSIS, DOM MICHEL TOUSSAINTS CHRÉTIEN, Histoire de la ville et des seigneurs de
Coucy. Paris, 1728.
††DURRIEU, PAUL, “La Prise d’Arezzo par Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy, en 1384.”
BEC, vol. XLI, 1880.
DUVAL, M. R., “Histoire de l’Abbaye bénédictine de St. Nicolas-aux-bois au diocèse de
Laon.” Mémoires de la Soc. Acad. de St.-Quentin, 4th series, vol. XII, 1893–96.

††LACAILLE, HENRI, “Enguerrand de Coucy au service de Grégoire XI, 1372–14.”
Annuaire Bulletin de la SHF, vol. XXXII, 1895. (A collection from the Vatican
Archives of the letters of Gregory XI concerning Coucy’s command in the War
of the Papal League, 1372–74.)
††——,“La Vente de la baronnie de Coucy.” BEC, vol. LV, 1894.
LAROUSSE, Grand Dictionnaire universel, 1869, article “Coucy-le-Château.”
LEFÈVRE-PONTALIS, EUGÈNE, Le Château de Coucy. Paris, 1909.
LELONG, DOM NICOLAS, Histoire ecclésiastique et civile du diocèse de Laon. Châlons,
1783.
LÉPINOIS, E. DE, Histoire de la ville et des sires de Coucy. Paris, 1859.
††MANGIN, “Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy: Pièces inédites concernant son départ pour
la Hongrie et sa mort.” Bulletin de la Soc. Acad. de Laon, vol. XXIV, 1882.
MAZAS, ALEXANDRE, Vie des grands capitaines français du moyen age, vol. III. 3rd ed.
Paris, 1845. (Lively and interesting but unreliable and in some cases
imaginary.)
MELLEVILLE, MAXIMILIEN, Histoire de la ville et des sires de Coucy-le-Château. Laon,
1848.
MOREAU, JULES, Notices sur les sires de Coucy. Chauny, 1871.
††Roussel, L’ABBÉ R., Histoire de l’abbaye des Célestins de Villeneuve-les-Soissons.
Soissons, 1904.
SARS, COMTE MAXIME DE, La Laonnais féodale, vol. IV. Paris, 1931.
SAVAGE, HENRY L., “Enguerrand de Coucy VII and the Campaign of Nicopolis.”
Speculum, October 1939.
VIOLLET-LE-DUC, E., Description du château dg Coucy. Paris, 1880. (Largely repeated
from his Dictionnaire.)
ZURLAUBEN, BARON VON THURN UND, “Abrégé de la vie d’Enguerrand VII du nom, Sire de
Couci.” Histoire de l’Académie royale des inscriptions et belles lettres, vol. XXV.
Paris, 1759.

II. GENERAL
A. PRIMARY SOURCES
ALLMAND, C. T., ed., Society at War: The Experience of England and France During the
Hundred Years War. Edinburgh, 1973. (Excerpts from contemporary texts.)
Anonimalle Chronicle (St. Mary’s York). Ed. V. H. Galbraith. Manchester, 1927.
BARNIE, JOHN, War in Medieval English Society. Cornell University Press, 1974.
(Excerpts from contemporary texts.)
BEAUREPAIRE, CH. DE, “Complainte sur la Bataille de Poitiers.” BEC, vol. XII, 1851.
BELL, CLAIR HAYDEN, ed., Peasant Life in Old German Epics. Columbia University
Press, 1968. (Contains two 13th century narrative poems, “Meier Helbricht” and
“Der Arme Heinrich,” which, though not strictly applicable to 14th century
France, are revealing of medieval peasant life.)
BERRY, Duc DE, The Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry. Eds. Jean Longman
and Raymond Cazelles, with preface by Millard Meiss. New York, 1969.
BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI, The Decameron. Trans. Frances Winwar. New York, 1930.
BONET, HONORÉ, The Tree of Battles. Trans, and ed. G. W. Coopland. Harvard
University Press, 1949.
BOUCICAUT. See Godefroy and Livre des faits.
BRIANS, PAUL, ed., Bawdy Tales from the Courts of Medieval France. New York, 1972.
BRUCKER, GENE, ed., The Society of Renaissance Florence. New York, 1971. (Excerpts
from contemporary documents.)
——, Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence. New York, 1967. (Contains excerpts
from the journal of Buonaccorso Pitti.)
CHANDOS HERALD, Life of the Black Prince. Trans. M. K. Pope and E. C. Lodge.
Oxford, 1910.
CHAPLAIS, PIERRE, “Some Documents Regarding the Fulllment and Interpretation
of the Treaty of Brétigny, 1361–69.” Camden Miscellany, vol. XIX (Camden
Third Series, vol. LXXX). London, 1952.

CHAUCER, GEOFFREY, The Canterbury Tales. Ed. Walter Skeat. New York, 1929.
CHRISTINE DE PISAN, The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyvalrye. Trans. William
Caxton. Ed. A. T. P. Byles. Oxford University Press, 1932.
——, Le Livre des Fais et Bonnes Meurs du Sage Roy Charles V. Ed. S. Solente.
2 vols. Paris, 1936–40.
Chronicle of Jean de Venette. Trans. Jean Birdsall. Ed. Richard A. Newhall.
Columbia University Press, 1953, Chronicon Angliae. See Walsingham.
Chronique du Bon Duc Loys de Bourbon. Ed. A. M. Chazaud. Paris, 1876. (Cited in
Notes as Chron. Bourbon.)
Chronique de Jean de Bel. Eds. Jules Viard and Eugene Deprez. 2 vols. SHF, Paris,
1904–5.
Chronique normande du XIVe siècle. Eds. A. and E. Molinier. Paris, 1882.
Chronique des quatre premiers Valois, 1327–1393. Ed. Siméon Luce. SHF, Paris,
1862. (Cited as Chron. 4 Valois.)
Chronique des règnes de Jean II et de Charles V. Ed. R. Delachenal. 4 vols. SHF,
Paris, 1910–20. (Cited as Chron. J. & C.)
Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys: La Règne de Charles VI, de 1380 à 1422.
Trans, and ed. M. L. Bellaguet. 6 vols. Paris, 1839. (Cited as Chron. C6.)
Chronographia Regum Francorum (formerly designated Chronique de Berne). Ed. H.
Moranvillé. 3 vols. SHF, Paris, 1891–97.
CUVELIER, J., Chronique de Bertrand du Guesclin. Ed. E. Charrière. 2 vols. Paris,
1839.
DELISLE, LÉOPOLD, Les Collections de Bastard d’Estang à la Bibliothèque nationale.
Nogent-le-Rotrin, 1886. (Summaries of the contents of contemporary
documents. Very valuable.)
DELISLE, M. L., ed., “Un Pamphlet politique au XlVe Siècle” (the Tragicum
Argumentum). Bull, historique et philologique, 1886. Paris, 1887.
DEMAY, GERMAIN, Inventaire des sceaux de la collection Clairembault, vol. II. Paris,
1886.
——, Inventaire des sceaux de la Flandre, vol I. Paris, 1883.

DESCHAMPS, EUSTACHE, Oeuvres complètes. Eds. Marquis de Queux de Saint-Hilaire
and G. Raynaud. 11 vols. Paris, 1878–1901.
DÍAZ DE GÓMEZ, GUTIERRE, El Victorial: The Unconquered Knight, A Chronicle of the
Deeds of Don Pero Niño, Count of Buelna. Trans, and ed. Joan Evans. London,
1928.
DOUET-D’ARCQ, LOUIS, ed., Choix de Pièces inédites relatives au règne de Charles VI. 2
vols. Paris, 1863.
DUCKETT, SIR GEORGE FLOYD, ed., Original Documents Relating to Hostages for John,
King of France, and the Treaty of Brétigpy in 1360. London, 1890.
EGBERT, VIRGINIA WYLIE, ed., On the Bridges of Medieval Paris; A Record of Early
Fourteenth Century Life. Princeton, 1974. (Excellent reproduction of illustrations
with commentary; a beautiful piece of bookmaking.)
FROISSART, JEAN, Chronicles of England, France and Spain. Trans. Thomas Johnes,
2nd ed. in 2 vols. London, 1806. (Best for the general reader. Modernized
language and some cuts.)
——, The Chronicle of Froissart. Trans. Lord Berners, 1523–25. Ed. W. P. Ker. 6
vols. London, 1902. (Text of the original translation with a useful introduction
by the editor but no notes.)
——, Chroniques. Ed. Siméon Luce et al. 14 vols. Paris, 1869–1966. (The notes are
a scholarly work in themselves, but the edition is dicult to use because of
confusing organization and pagination. Cited as Luce-F.)
——, Oeuvres. Ed. Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove. 25 vols. Brussels, 1870–75. (The
most useful edition for index, biographies, and editorial material. Cited as KL.)
——, “Le Trettie du Joli Buisson de Jonece.” Collection des chroniques nationales
françaises, vol. X. Ed. J. A. Buchon. Paris, 1829.
GERMAIN, A., Projet de descente en Angleterre … pour la délivrance du Roi Jean:
Extrait de documents originaux inédits. Montpellier, 1858.
GILLES LI MUISIS (ABBÉ DE ST. MARTIN DE TOURNAI), Chronique et annales. Ed. H.
Lemaitre. SHF. Paris, 1906.
GODEFROY, THEODORE, ed., Histoire de Maréchal de Boucicaut. Paris, 1620. (This was
the rst publication of the Livre des faits … de Boucicaut, from the ms. in the

BN, of which only one copy exists.)
GODFREY LE BAKER, Chronicon. Ed. Edwin M. Thompson (with parts translated).
Oxford, 1889.
Grandes Chroniques de France, vol. IX (to 1350). Ed. Jules Viard. Paris, 1937.
——, vol. VI (to 1380). Ed. Paulin Paris. Paris, 1838.
GRAY, SIR THOMAS, Scalacronica. Trans. Sir Herbert Maxwell. Glasgow, 1905–7.
GUIBERT, ABBOT OF NOGENT, Memoirs. Trans. John L. Benton. New York, 1970.
HELLMAN, ROBERT, and RICHARD O’GORMAN, eds., Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old
French. New York, 1965.
HERLIHY, DAVID, ed., Medieval Culture and Society. New York, 1968. (Anthology of
contemporary texts.)
JEAN LE FÈVRE, EVÊQUE DE CHARTRES, Journal de Jean le Fèvre, vol. I. Ed. H.
Moranvillé. Paris, 1887.
JEAN JUVENAL DES URSINS, ARCHEVÊQUE DE REIMS, Histoire de Charles VI. Ed. Th.
Godefroy. Paris, 1614. Also in Nouvelle Collection des mémoires relatifs à l’histoire
de France, vol. II. Eds. J. F. Michaud and J. J. F. Poujoulat. Paris, 1881.
JOHN OF READING, Chronica. Ed. James Tait. Manchester, 1914.
KOENIGSHOFEN, JACOB VON, Elsassiche und Strassburgische chronicke (c. 1400). Ed. J.
Schilter. Strasburg, 1698.
LANGLAND, WILLIAM, The Vision of Piers Plowman. Ed. Henry W. Wells. New York,
1935.
LANGLOIS, CHARLES VICTOR, La Connaissance de la nature et du monde au moyen age
d’après quelques écrits français à l’usage des laics. Paris, 1911. (Contains Image du
monde, Roman de Sidrach, and other encyclopedists. This is vol. III of what was
later published as La Vie en France au moyen age, 4 vols., Paris, 1924–28. A
collection of medieval writings on many subjects, this work is indispensable for
a knowledge of the medieval mind.)
LA TOUR LANDRY, GEOFFREY, The Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry. Trans. G. S.
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Livre des faits du Mareschal de Boucicaut, in Nouvelle Collection des mémoires relatifs
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1881. See also Godefroy.
MACHAUT, GUILLAUME DE, Les Oeuvres. Ed. Prosper Tarbé. Reims, 1849.
MÉNAGIER DE PARIS, LE, The Goodman of Paris. Ed. and trans. Eileen Power. London,
1928.
MÉZIÈRES, PHILIPPE DE, Le Songe du Vieil Pèlerin. Ed. with synopsis and commentary
by G. W. Coopland. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1969.
MURATORI, L. A., ed., Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. Milan, 1723–51.
NOHL, JOHANNES, The Black Death: A Chronicle of the Plague Compiled from
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ORLÉANS, H. D., ed., Notes et documents relatifs à Jean, Roi de France et à sa captivité
en Angleterre, vol. II. London, 1855–56.
OWST, GERALD R., ed., Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England. Cambridge
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Petrarch … A Selection from His Correspondence. Eds. James Harvey Robinson and
H. W. Rolfe. New York, 1898.
Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden. Ed. Joseph R. Lumby. Vol. VIII. London, 1882.
PROST, B., ed., Inventaires mobiliers et extraits des comptes des ducs de Bourgogne,
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SCHILLING, DIEBOLD, Berner Chronik. Eds. H. Blesch and P. Hilber. Vol. I. Bern, 1943.
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SCHILTBERGER, JOHANN, The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger. Trans. J.
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indicates works of special value or unique material
ABRAHAMS, ISRAEL, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia, 1958.
ANQUETIL, Louis PIERRE, Histoire de France, vol. II. 3rd ed. Paris, 1829.
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Paris, 1733. (Contains most of the higher nobility including the Coucys.)
ARIES, PHILIPPE, Centuries of Childhood. Trans. New York, 1962.
ARMITAGE-SMITH, SYDNEY, John of Gaunt. London, 1904.

ARTZ, FREDERICK B., The Mind of the Middle Ages, A.D. 200–1500. New York, 1953.
ATIYA, AZIZ SURYAL, The Crusade in the Later Middle Ages. London, 1938.
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BERESFORD, MAURICE, and JOHN B. HURST, Deserted Medieval Villages. London, 1971.
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——, Feudal Society. Trans. (La société féodale.) University of Chicago Press, 1971.
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BLOOMFIELD, MORTON W., Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth Century Apocalypse. Rutgers
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——, “La Peste de 1348–49 en Langue d’oil; épidémie prolitarienne et enfantine.”
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CHAZAN, ROBERT, Medieval Jewry in Northern France. Johns Hopkins University
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CHEYNEY, EDWARD P., The Dawn of a New Era, 1250–1453. New York, 1962. (A
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*CHOTZEN, TH. M., “Yvain de Galles in Alsace-Lorraine and in Switzerland.” Bull, of
the Board of Celtic Studies, 1928.
CHUBB, THOMAS CALDECOTT, The Life of Giovanni Boccaccio. New York, 1930.
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COHEN, GUSTAVE, Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux français du
moyen age. Paris, 1951.
——, La Vie littéraire en France au moyen age. Paris, 1949.

COHN, NORMAN, The Pursuit of the Millennium. New Jersey, 1957. Reissue. Oxford
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English aairs for the period 1337–81.)
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CONTAMINE, PHILIPPE, Guerre, état et société à la n du moyen age. Paris, 1972.
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COPLESTON, F. C., A History of Medieval Philosophy. London, 1972.
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Paris, 1911.
COUDERC, CAMILLE, Album de portraits d’après les collections du Département des
Manuscripts. Paris, 1910.
Coulton, G. G., The Black Death. London, 1929.
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Reference Notes
References are given for most quotations and for curious,
debatable, or relatively obscure items for which an inquiring reader
might want to know the source. I have not documented the better-
known facts, events, and general conditions, which can be found in
standard histories. With regard to quotations from the chronicles
and other contemporary writers such as the Ménagier, La Tour
Landry, Chaucer, Langland et al., I have given page references
where it seemed important. Otherwise, when the source is named in
the text and the work appears in the Bibliography, I have not
thought it necessary to cite the page. This applies especially to
Froissart, both for the sake of reducing bulk and because I read or
consulted dierent editions (Berners, Johnes, Kervyn Lettenhove,
Luce) at dierent times, resulting in too many variants.
ABBREVIATIONS
AN Archives nationales
BN Bibliothèque nationale
CMH Cambridge Medieval History, vol. VII
DBF Dictionnaire de biographie française, 1933– (in progress; at
the time used by the author, this had reached the letter F)
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
KL Kervyn Lettenhove edition of Froissart
LUCE-F Luce edition of Froissart
OCFL Oxford Companion to French Literature

Foreword
1 THOMPSON: Aftermath, 565.
2 SISMONDI: Républiques, chap. 38. The original is “ne fut point heureuse pour
l’humanité.” “A PERIOD OF ANGUISH”: Heers, 111.
3 PERROY: Hundred Years, χ.
4 COMTE D’AUXERRE: Delachenal, I, 207, n. 3.
5 ISABEAU OF BAVARIA, A BLONDE: Mazas, IV, 181. “DARK AND LIVELY”: CMH, 375
6 HUNGARIAN HISTORIAN: Otto Zarek, A History of Hungary, trans., London, 1939.
Chapter 1—“I Am the Sire de Coucy”: The Dynasty
2 SOURCES FOR THE CASTLE AND donjon: Viollet-le-Duc, Dict., II, 440–41; III, 113–14;
V, 34, 74–75, 79; Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel, V, 1869; Dufour;
Lefèvre-Pontalis. COMPARISON TO THE PYRAMIDS: q. Dufour, 21.
3 “Coucy à la merveille!”: L’Art de vérier. “Roi ne suis”: Duchesne, 205. CASTLE
BUILT IN SEVEN YEARS: Viollet-le-Duc, Dict., V, 74.
4 “WORTHY OF NERO”: Antoine d’Asti, secretary of Charles, Duc d’Orléans,
inheritor of the Coucy domain. Description of the castle written 1410, q.
Dufour, 58.
5 “ONE OF THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM”: SO described in a suit over disputed property
brought in 1407 by the Duc d’Orléans against Coucy’s grandson, Robert de
Bar, based on the claim that the barony must be held as a whole by its
seigneur in order that he may “better resist those who come against the said
kingdom,” q. Jarry, Orléans, 240. (The date 1447 given by Jarry must be a
typographical error.)
6 . HISTORY OF THE DYNASTY: Duchesne, 185–274; L’Art de vérier, 219 .; Sars,
passim; Duplessis.
7 ENGUERRAND I AND SYBIL: Guibert of Nogent, 148–50.
8 “RAGING WOLF”: Suger in Vie de Louis VI le Gros, q. Ross & McLaughlin, 267–73.

9 ORIGIN OF THE COUCY ARMS: Ancien, based on Duchesne and L’Alouëte. Other
versions in Rev. Nobiliare, 1865, vol. Ill, q. Lacaille thèse; also Histoire de la
ville de Marie, q. Chaurand, 67–68. See also Dumas & Martinet, 17; Duckett,
19. THOMAS DE MARLE’S CAREER: Guibert of Nogent, 170, 184–85, 199, and
dynastie sources.
10 CHARTER OF COUCY-LE-CHÂTEAU: Sars, 170; Larousse, Gr. Encyc.
11 ENGUERRAND III: Lelong, 281, 286–87.
12 HIS CONSTRUCTIONS AT COUCY: Viollet-le-Duc, Dict., IV, 233–34.
13 AMIENS, “HIGHER THAN ALL THE SAINTS”: J. Brandicourt & J. Desobry, The
Cathedral of Amiens, undated brochure issued by the Cathedral.
14 DUC DE BERRY AND CHAPEL WINDOWS: Dufour, 51.
15 COINED OWN MONEY: Sars, 194. COUCY OWED 30 KNIGHTS: Lot & Fawtier, 517.
16 ENGUERRAND IV: for his trial, in addition to dynastic sources, see Margaret
Wade Lafarge, St. Louis, Boston, 1968, 175–76.
17 VALUE OF 20 sous: Perroy, “Wage Labour,” 45, n. 1; Jusserand, 46–47, 51.
18 “OF THE GOOD TOWNS”: Georges Chastellain, q. Cartellieri, 76. “EXPOSURE OF THEIR
BODIES”: q. Bloch, Feudal, 451.
19 AQUINAS, “COMMON GOOD”: q. Jarret, Social, 18. “PRINCES ARE INSTITUTED”: ibid.
20 “NOT ONE OF US”: Girard de Roussilon, q. Oakeshott, 53.
21 GARIN LI LOHERAINS: q. Gautier (Eng. ed.), 281.
22 BERTRAND DE BORN: q. Bloch, Feudal, 293. DANTE PUT HIM IN HELL: Inferno, XXVIII.
23 “NOT PROPER FOR A NOBLE”: Lewis, 175, 180. SONS OF NOBLES AS MERCHANTS:
Cazelles, Société politique, 290.
24 “SHALL HAVE NO CAUSE”: Bonet, 131.
25 KNIGHT WITH 32 COATS-OF-ARMS: He was Jacques de Lalaing; Cartellieri, 75.
26 DURATION OF NOBLE FAMILIES: Lewis, 176–77.
27 DISAPPEARANCE RATE OF 50 PERCENT: Perroy, “Social Mobility.” CLUSEL AND
GUICHARD VERT: ibid.

28 SUMPTUARY LAWS: Baldwin, passim.
29 IN FLORENCE: Origo, 290, 298, 300–301. IN FRANCE: Franklin, Rues et cris, 35–
36.
30 KNIGHTON: q. Baldwin, 69.
31 GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS: q. Shears in Prestage, 57. UNCOUTH GERMANS: Bonet, 204.
“MOST CHIVALROUS SOJOURN”: q. Michelet, III, 255. DON PERO NIÑO: q. Díaz de
Gómez (Evans trans.), 133.
32 FRENCH LANGUAGE, MARCO POLO, ST. FRANCIS, VENETIAN SCHOLAR: Artz, 350; Cheyney,
248–49.
33 LONDON BRIDGE: Jusserand, 23–24. FRENCH DOLLS: Bradley, 136.
34 FRENCH IVORIES: E. Mâle, Art et artistes du moyen age, Paris, 1927, 313–14.
35 “YOU PARIS MASTERS”: q. E. R. Chamberlin, Life in Medieval France, London,
1967, 118. “TWO LIGHTS OF THE WORLD”: q. Coville, 394.
36 CEREMONY OF THE rissoles: Dufour, 62–64; Lelong, 181.
Chapter 2—Born to Woe: The Century
1 BALTIC SEA: J. C. Russell, Fontana, 24. CASPIAN SEA: Carpentier, “Autour de la
peste noire.”
2 PEOPLE EATING CHILDREN: Russell, Op. cit.
3 BISHOP DENIED BURIAL: CMH, 280.
4 CHILDREN OF PRIESTS: Flick, 175–76. AND OTHER DISPENSATIONS: ibid., 121–22.
5 ALVAR PELAYO, “I FOUND BROKERS”: q. ibid., 180.
6 UNFIT CLERGY, BOY OF SEVEN ET AL.: ibid., 174. BISHOP OF DURHAM: Coulton,
Panorama, 128.
7 HENRY OF HEREFORD: q. Cohn, 133–34.
8 JOHN XXII, GOLD CLOTH AND FURS: Origo, 8.
9 “RICH, INSOLENT AND RAPACIOUS”: q. Hay, 277. CARDINAL’S TEN STABLES: CMH, 282.

10 PETRARCH ON “BABYLON OF THE WEST”: Robinson, Readings, I, 502–3. LATRINES OF
THE PAPAL PALACE: Gagnière. AMBASSADOR FROM ARAGON: Origo, 7.
11 ST. BRIGITTA, “A FIELD FULL OF PRIDE”: q. Hay, 277.
12 ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY’S COMPLAINT: q. Cutts, 242–43. MATTEO VILLANI: q.
Emerton, 178.
13 14TH CENTURY POEM: T. Wright, Political Songs, I, 264–66. “DID NOT BEHAVE AS
FRIARS OUGHT”: q. Jusserand, 170.
14 ST. FRANCIS AND BREVIARY: ibid., 166.
15 MONKS LENT MONEY AT INTEREST: Coulton, Panorama, 269.
16 “MUSTARD POTTIS”: q. Jusserand, 171–72. BOILING AN EGG: Ménagier de Paris,
295.
17 FEAST OF FOOLS: Chambers, 294, 315, 325–27; Gayley, 49–50.
18 “THE THORN FALLS OUT”: Chron. C6, I, 317. WOMAN ACCUSED OF INCEST: Cohen, 327.
19 PETRARCH, “A HARD AND WEARY JOURNEY”: Correspondence, 398. “TURN THEE AGAIN”:
q. Herlihy, Med. Culture, 409.
20 GASCON SEIGNEUR: He was Amanieu d’Albret VI, q. Boutruche, 177. JOINVILLE
ON THE POOR: q. Shears in Prestage, 64.
21 ST. AUGUSTINE: q. Coulton, Panorama, 369. ST. JEROME: q. Pirenne, Europe, 229.
22 “DEVIL ON THE LID”: q. Pirenne, loc. cit. DATINI’S MOTTO: Origo, xiv. PHILIPPE DE
BEAUMANOIR: q. Mollat & Wol, 46.
23 Confréries: Mâle, 167 .; M. Mollat, Vie, 91–103.
24 JACQUES DE VITRY: q. Davis, 271, and Evans, Med. France, 34.
25 TEMPLARS ACCUSED OF BLACK ARTS: Jery Russell, 195–96, 198.
26 “AND HE WOULD HAVE CONFESSED”: q. CMH, 318–19.
27 MOLAY’S CURSE: The eyewitness report by Godfrey of Paris is quoted in Nouv.
biog. générale, ed. Hoefer, Paris, 1861. See also Marcel Lobet, Histoire des
Templiers, Liège, 1944, 225; M. Reynouard, Procès et condamnation des
Templiers, Paris, 1805, 113.

28 “BAD LAME QUEEN”: Coville, 399. PHILIP VI and THE BEATIFIC VISION: Lea, III, 590,
593; Cath. Encyc, II, 430; Coville, 14.
29 THREAT TO BURN THE POPE: reported by Giovanni Villani, q. J. B. Christophe,
Histoire de la Papauté, Paris, 1853, II, 30.
30 PHILIP ARRANGES MARRIAGE OF ENGUERRAND VI: Duchesne, 262–63.
31 EMPEROR LUDWIG AND DAUGHTER: Jarrett, Social, 58.
Chapter 3—Youth and Chivalry
1 ENGLISH PREACHER ON MOTHER AND CHILD: q. Owst, 34–35.
2 KNITTING ON FOUR NEEDLES: White, “Technology Assessment” with illus. Ancren
Riivle: q. McLaughlin, 153, n. 90.
3 INFANT MORTALITY ESTIMATED: McLaughlin, III.
4 PHILIP OF NOVARA: “Des iiii tenz d’aage d’ome” [The four ages of man] in Langlois,
II, 210–11.
5 ADVICE ON ETIQUETTE: Ménagier, 10, 14–17, 20, 24, 47, 204, 209, 215, 219; T.
Wright, Manners, 275; Christine de Pisan, Livre des trois vertus, q. Power, 318;
Fra Benvenisco da Ripa, Zinquanta cortesi da Tavola [Fifty courtesies at the
table], q. Aries, 381. On absence of advice on child-rearing, see Power, 420.
6 BARTHOLOMEW OF ENGLAND and ALDOBRANDINO OF SIENA: q. McLaughlin, 115, 137,
144, n. 31.
7 HALF THE POPULATION UNDER 21: J. C. Russell, Fontana, 31.
8 BOCCACCIO, “BIRDS, WILD BEASTS”: Questioni d’Amore, chap. 5, q. Putnam’s Reader,
188.
9 CHRONICLER’S COMPLAINT OF SHORT TUNICS: Jean de Venette, q. Luce, Jacquerie, 37.
10 MARCH, “IN WHICH THE WORLD BEGAN”: Nun’s Priest’s Tale.
11 A SCHOLAR OF OXFORD: Thorndike, III, 143. MENTAL DEPRESSION AN ILLNESS: ibid.,
251. TRIANGULATION BY A MONK: Davis, 338. WINDMILLS MUST PAY TITHES: White,
Med. Tech., 89.

12 TRAVEL—DISTANCES AND CONDITIONS: Boyer; Jusserand, 123; Hay, 363;
d’Haucourt, 17; Cipolla, 534; Boissonade, 287; T. Wright, Manners.
13 VENICE-TO-BRUGES POSTAL SERVICE: Origo, 99.
14 SIR HERVÉ DE LÉON: Coulton, Panorama, 325. PILGRIMS’ “HERTES BEGIN TO FAYLE”:
ibid.
15 DESCHAMPS ON GERMAN INNS: q. Coopland in notes to Mézières, I, 36. KNEW THE
WORLD WAS ROUND: Bartholomew of England, Image du Monde and others in
Langlois, Connaissance.
16 AS A FLY ON AN APPLE: Image, q. ibid., 78. DISTANCE FROM THE STARS: ibid., 79.
17 UNIVERSE IN GOD’S ARMS: Mâle, 298. MOON, ECLIPSE, RAIN, TIME BETWEEN THUNDER AND
LIGHTNING: Image du Monde, 97–100. VIEWS OF INDIA, PERSIA: ibid., 83–84.
18 GARDEN OF EDEN: Howard Patch, The Other World, Harvard University Press,
1950.
19 “THEY ARE AS GOD PLEASES”: ibid., 93.
20 BOOK OF SIDRACH: Langlois, Connaissance, 224 .
21 DANTE, CHANTED BY BLACKSMITHS, AND PUBLIC LECTURES ON: Cheyney, 260.
22 ITALIAN BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY: Bandini of Arezzo, Fons memorabilium universi,
q. Thorndike, III, 562.
23 CATHERINE’S HUSBAND: He is named Conrad de Hardeck in L’Art de vérier, 237,
and Conrad de Magdebourg by La Chesnaye-Desbois. 62 CATHERINE’S CARE FOR
SON’S EDUCATION: BN, ms. fr. 18616.
24 JOHN OF SALISBURY: q. Coulton, Panorama, 242. JOHN THE BLIND DUG UP
SYNAGOGUE: Jarrett, Charles IV, 104, n. 1. HIS DEATH: Froissart on Crécy.
25 COST OF HELMET AND WAR-HORSE: Contamine, 656.
26 ST. BERNARD ON TOURNAMENTS: Gautier, 272.
27 KEEP HIS TEETH AND NAILS CLEAN: Painter, 135. Châtelain de Coucy: Delbouille,
passim.
28 “MELANCHOLY, AMOROUS AND BARBARIC”: Gaston Paris, q. in Larousse, Gr. Encyc,
XIII, 34.

29 EDWARD III AND COUNTESS OF SALISBURY: Chron. Jean le Bel, 30–34; Chron.
normande, 54, 59–60; Luce-F, II, 346, and IV, xviii–ix.
30 IDENTITY OF JEAN LE BEL: Snell, 339; Coville, 413.
31 TEUTONIC KNIGHTS HUNTED PEASANTS FOR SPORT: Pirenne, Europe, II, 110.
Chapter 4—War
1 LONGBOW: Stein, 66; Lot & Fawtier, 528.
2Ribauds (CANNON): Oman, 211–17; Chron. Jean de Venette, 157, n. 45.
3 “OH, THE COWARDLY ENGLISH”: Walsingham, q. KL, III, notes, 491. FISH DRANK SO
MUCH FRENCH BLOOD: Melsa Chron., q. notes to Chron. Jean de Venette, 154, n.
27.
4 EDWARD III, “CHARM” AND “PETULANCE”: CMH, 438.
5 AQUINAS ON “JUST WAR”: q. Jarrett, Social, 193; Painter, 157. “RIGHT OF SPOIL”:
Keen, Laws, 65, 74–75, 140.
6 MICHELET ON BRITTANY: from the famous “Tableau de France” in the Histoire, II,
7–18.
7 CHARLES DE BLOIS—CHARACTER: Huizinga, Waning, 178. BAREFOOT IN THE SNOW: ibid.
8 HURLED 30 HEADS: Mackinnon, 219; see also Roujoux, Hist, des rois et des ducs de
Bretagne, 1839, III, 127; A. Clauziou, Hist, de Bretagne, 1941, 97–98.
9 QUEEN JEANNE ON BRUGES: q. Mollat & Wol, 25.
10 MATTHEW OF WESTMINSTER ON WOOL: q. Thompson, 61. COURTRAI, LOSSES MADE UP
BY ENNOBLEMENT: Bloch, Feudal, 324–25.
11 ARTEVELDE STRIKES FLEMISH KNIGHT: Pemoud, 214.
12 ARTEVELDE’S DEATH: Froissart. “Il piccolo re”: q. Tourneur, 467.
13 Double et louche: III, 250.
14 ADVICE OF PARLIAMENT IN 1344: Barnes, 303.

15 SHIPS FOR EXPEDITIONARY FORCE: Hewitt, Organization, 51, 76; Coopland, in notes
to Mézières, I, 59.
16 RECRUITMENT AND PROPAGANDA: Oman, 126; Hewitt, op. cit., 30, 159. 84
MILITARY OBLIGATION OF TOWNS: Contamine, 33, 176. ROUEN, NARBONNE, NÎMES:
Henneman, Royal, 116, 120, 122, 135, 147.
17 KNIGHTS’ RATES OF PAY: Contamine, 622–23, 626. THE montre: ibid., 537. ARMOR
AND HELMET: Oakeshott, 15, 43; Cutts, 344–45; Contamine, 656.
18 “TERRIBLE WORM”: q. Lefranc, 137, from an unnamed contemporary poem, not
further identied, MACE FAVORED BY MARTIAL CLERICS: Davis, 196.
19 FRENCH DISDAINED MISSILES: Evans, Life, 140. ARCHER AS “COWARD”: q. Davis, 190.
20 CROSSBOW BANNED BY CHURCH: Painter, 21.
21 CRÉCY: The battle is described in all the chronicles. A useful summary is in
Lot, 340–50.
22 ENGLISH ARCHERS PROTECTED BOWSTRINGS: Chron. Jean de Venette, 43. The subject
of the wet and dry bowstrings and whether, when wet, they shrink or stretch
has been a question of intense discussion among the Crécy bus, and even of
physical experiment by one historian who soaked bowstrings in water to
determine the answer.
23 “15 DENIERS WORTH THREE”: Chron. 4 Valois, 14. ESTATES’ DISPLEASURE VOICED:
Perroy, Hundred Years, 121.
24 ISABELLE’S BETROTHAL TO LOUIS DE MALE: Chron. Jean le Bel, II, 135–39; Chron.
normande, 84–86, 276, n. 7; Luce-F, IV, nn. 1–2, 34–37; Grandes Chrons., ed.
Viard, IX, 292; Chron. Jean de Venette, 47–48, 184–85, n. 27; Chron. de Jean
de Noyal, ed. Molinier, Bull. SHF, 1883, 253. Song about Isabelle is in Jean de
Venette, 48. Summary of the sources in Henry Lucas, The Low Countries and
the Hundred Years’ War, 1929, 559–65.
25 CALAIS REDUCED TO EATING EXCREMENT (“Toutes ordures par droite famine”): q.
CMH, 349.
26 NUMBERS ENGAGED IN CRÉCY-CALAIS: Postan, EHR.

Chapter 5—“This Is the End of the World”: The Black Death
The chief sources used for this chapter were Campbell; Carpentier;
Crawfurd; Coulton, Black Death; Gasquet; Hecker; Ziegler; also
Barnes; Bowsky; Bridbury; Cazelles, Peste; Deaux; Meiss,
Painting … After the Black Death; Nohl; Renouard: Saltmarsh;
Seebohm; Thompson; Thrupp. On the Jews: Abrahams; Salo Baron;
Chazan, and Encyclopedia Judaica, Jerusalem and New York, 1970–
71.
1 “DEATH IS SEEN SEATED”: Simon de Covino, q. Campbell, 80.
2 “COULD INFECT THE WORLD”: q. Gasquet, 41. WELSH LAMENT: q. Ziegler, 190.
3 “DOGS DRAGGED THEM FORTH”: Agnolo di Tura, q. Ziegler, 58.
4 “OR IF NO MAN IS PRESENT”: Bishop of Bath and Wells, q. Ziegler, 125.
5 “NO BELLS TOLLED”: Agnolo di Tura, q. Schevill, Siena, 211. The same
observation was made by Gabriel de Muisis, notary of Piacenza, q. Crawfurd,
113.
6 p. 95 GIVRY PARISH REGISTER: Renouard, III. THREE VILLAGES OF CAMBRIDGESHIRE:
Saltmarsh.
7 PETRARCH’S BROTHER: Bishop, 273. BROTHER JOHN CLYN: q. Ziegler, 195.
8 APATHY; “AND IN THESE DAYS”: q. Deaux, 143, citing only “an old northern
chronicle.”
9 AGNOLO DI TURA, “FATHER ABANDONED CHILD”: q. Ziegler, 58.
10 “MAGISTRATES AND NOTARIES”: q. Deaux, 49. ENGLISH PRIESTS TURNED AWAY: Ziegler,
261.
11 PARENTS DESERTING CHILDREN: Hecker, 30. GUY DE CHAULIAC, “A FATHER”:
12 q. Gasquet, 50–51.
13 Q NUNS OF THE HÔTEL DIEU: Chron. Jean de Venette, 49.
14 Q PICARDS AND SCOTS MOCK MORTALITY OF NEIGHBORS: Gasquet, 53, and Ziegler,
198.

15 QCATHERINE DE COUCY: L’Art de vérier, 237. AMIENS TANNERS: Gasquet, 57. “BY THE
JOLLITY THAT IS IN us”: Grandes Chrons., VI, 486–87.
16 JOHN OF FORDUN: q. Ziegler, 199. SIMON DE COVINO ON THE POOR: Gasquet, 42. ON
YOUTH: Cazelles, Peste.
17 KNIGHTON ON SHEEP: q. Ziegler, 175. WOLVES OF AUSTRIA AND DALMATIA: ibid., 84,
III. DOGS AND CATS: Muisis, q. Gasquet, 44, 61.
18 BAVARIAN CHRONICLER OF NEUBERG: q. Ziegler, 84. WALSINGHAM, “THE WORLD COULD
NEVER”: Denie, 273. “OH HAPPY POSTERITY”: q. Ziegler, 45. GIOVANNI VILLANI, “e
dure questo”: q. Snell, 334.
19 PHYSICIANS OF VENICE: Campbell, 98. SIMON DE COVINO: ibid., 31. GUY DE CHAULIAC,
“I WAS IN FEAR”: q. Thompson, Ec. and Soc., 379. THUCYDIDES: q. Crawfurd, 30–
31.
20 CHINESE ORIGIN: Although the idea of Chinese origin is still being repeated
(e.g., by William H. McNeill, Plagues and People, New York, 1976, 161–63), it
is disputed by L. Carrington Goodrich of the Association for Asian Studies,
Columbia Univ., in letters to the author of 18 and 26 October 1973. Citing
contemporary Chinese and other sources, he also quotes Dr. George A. Perera
of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, an authority on communicable
diseases, who “agrees with me that the spaces between epidemics in China
(1334), Semirechyé (1338–9) and the Mediterranean basin (1347–9) seem
too long for the rst to be responsible for the last.”
21 REPORTS FROM THE EAST: Barnes, 432; Coulton, Black Death, 9–11.
22 ANONYMOUS FLEMISH CLERIC, “MOST TERRIBLE”: His correspondence was edited in
the form of a chronicle by De Smet, in Recueil des chroniques de Flandres, III,
q. Ziegler, 22. GENTILE DA FOLIGNO, “COMMUNICATED BY AIR”: Campbell, 38.
23 REPORT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS: Hecker, 51–53; Campbell, 15.
24 M. VILLANI, “EXTERMINATION OF MANKIND”: q. Meiss, Painting … After the Black
Death, 66. ROUEN PROHIBITS GAMBLING: Nohl, 74.
25 AT MESSINA, DEMONS LIKE DOGS: Coulton, Black Death, 22–27. PEST MAIDEN:
Ziegler, 85.
26 CANTACUZENE: Barnes, 435. PIERS PLOWMAN, “PURE SIN”: B text, V, 13.

27 CLEMENT VI, “SENSUAL VICES”: Gregorovius, VI, 334.
28 DOCTORS’ SKILLS: Thorndike, III, 249–51. CATARACTS: Gilles li Muisis, Chron., q.
in Intro, χ. SKIN GRAFTS: M. Rowling, Life in Medieval Times, New York, 1973,
192. See also Arturo Castiglione, A History of Medicine, New York, 1946, 398–
99.
29 SEWAGE DISPOSAL: Thrupp; Coulton, Panorama, 456; Sabine.
30 VISCONTI MEASURES: Hecker, 58. LEICESTERSHIRE AUTOCRAT RAZED NOSELEY: letter to
author, 25 June 1974, from Lord Hazelrigg, direct descendant of the autocrat,
and present proprietor of Noseley Hall.
31 LEGEND OF ST. ROCH; “IN THESE SAD TIMES”: q. Mâle, 190. “GOD IS DEAF”:
32 Passus X, line 79.
33 “HOSTILITY OF GOD”: q. Campbell, 132.
34 JEWS’ INTENT TO “KILL AND DESTROY”: Chron. Jean le Bel, I, 225, and Gilles li
Muisis, 222.
35 WELL-POISONING: Chron. Jean de Venette, 50; S. W. Baron, XI, 160. “RIVERS AND
FOUNTAINS”: from Jugement du Roi de Navarre, 70.
36 RABBI MOSES OF COUCY: Encyc. Jud., VI, 167; VII, 19. JEWS’ BADGE AND POINTED HAT:
Abrahams, 287; Enlart, 435. WILLIAM OF NEWBURGH: q. Coulton, Panorama, 359.
37 TRIALS IN SAVOY: COX, 60–70; “Black Death” in Encyc. Jud. CLEMENT’S BULL: Luce-
F, IV, 101.
38 FLAGELLANTS: Cohn, 125–37; CMH, chap. 10; Lea, II, 882; Hecker, 34–39;
Schnyder, 279–89.
39 MASSACRES AT WORMS, FRANKFURT, COLOGNE, MAINZ, ERFURT: Cohn, 138–39;
40 Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Philadelphia, 1894, IV, 109.
41 DUKE ALBERT H OF AUSTRIA: S. W. Baron, XI, 163. “LIKE NIGHT PHANTOMS”: q. Cohn,
139.
42 JEWS RETURN TO ERFURT: S. W. Baron, IX, 224.
43 DICE INTO PRAYER BEADS: Gasquet, 60. PIERS PLOWMAN: Passus IX, ed. Wells, 110.
44 M. VILLANI, “BETTER MEN”: q. Coulton, Black Death, 66–68.

45 ORVIETO: Carpentier, Ville, 190. PENALTY FOR INTERCOURSE BETWEEN CHRISTIAN AND
JEW: ibid., 196.
46 EMPEROR CHARLES IV, “PRECIOUS KNOWLEDGE”: Campbell, 150. CORPUS CHRISTI: ibid.,
150.
47 PETRARCH ON BOLOGNA: ibid., 159–60.
48 DECLINE IN POPULATION: J. C. Russell, “Med. pop.”; Carpentier, AESC; Bowsky;
Heers, 101–5; Hay, 76.
49 EFFECTS ON LABOR: Perroy in EHR; Seebohm, 269, 273; Helen Robbins, 473–76;
Heers, 108–11.
50 JUBILEE YEAR: Gregorovius, 323–25. “A PONTIFF SHOULD MAKE HIS SUBJECTS HAPPY”:
q. G. Mollat, Papes, 86.
51 TREASURY OF MERIT: Jusserand, 170.
52 A MILLION VISITORS: Meiss, 80.
53 BEQUESTS, ST. GERMAIN: Ziegler, 78. SIENA: Bowsky, 26. FLORENCE: Meiss, 78.
54 CARDINAL-LEGATE ATTACKED IN ROME: Gregorovlus, 325.
55“Bene quidem”: Coulton, Black Death, 59.
56 “WICKEDER THAN BEFORE”: Chron. Jean de Venette, 51. CLEMENT, “WHAT CAN YOU
PREACH”: ibid., 55–56. LOTHAR OF SAXONY: q. Campbell, 144. 124 TRAINI’S FRESCO:
Meiss, “Traini”; Supino, 73–80.
Chapter 6—The Battle of Poitiers
1 EXECUTION OF COMTE D’EU: This aair, generating a mass of gossip and
speculation, is treated at length by all the chroniclers—Jean le Bel, Chron. J.
& C., 4 Valois, Gilles li Muisis, Normande, and Froissart, with extensive notes
in Luce-F, IV, and KL Biog. Index, and discussion in Cazelles, Société pol.,
249–52.
2“Ung bien hastif homs”: Chron. 4 Valois, 16–17.
3 “A VERY CRUEL LADY”: KL, IV, 202.

4 GIRARD D’ORLÉANS, COURT PAINTER: Dupont & Gnudi, 134. ORDINANCE OF 1351: Lot;
Tourneur, Poitiers.
5 GILLES LI MUISIS ON MONEY: q. Lewis, 58.
6 GARTER’S HISTORIAN: Elias Ashmole, The History of the Most Noble Order of the
Garter, London, 1715.
7 ORDER OF THE STAR: Michelet, III, 294–95; Goville, 92; Contamine, 186–87;
Huizinga, Men and Ideas, 204; Anquetil, 402. For the Battle of Mauron, in
which the members were slaughtered, see Chron. normande, 106, and Luce-F,
IV, notes.
8 COMBAT OF THIRTY: KL, V, 514.
9 MURDER OF CHARLES D’ESPAGNE: all the chronicles, especially Chron. 4 Valois, 25–
28.
10 RIOT AT OXFORD: Trevelyan, English Social History, London, 1949, I, 49.
FRANCESCO ORDELAFFI: Emerton, 170.
11 ENGLAND, CORONERS’ ROLLS: Coulton, Panorama, 371.
12 VILLAGE GAMES: Origo, 42. CITIZENS OF MONS: Huizinga, Waning, 22–23.
13 CHARLES OF NAVARRE, LETTERS TO POPE AND EDWARD III: Denie, 99.
14 EDWARD III, “ON THE WORD OF A KING”: “In verbo regiae veritatis dicimus et
contestamur deliter coram Deo,” q. Denie, 103–4, from text in Secousse and
Rymer.
15 “HARRYING AND WASTING”: letter to Bishop of Winchester, q. Sedgwick, 117.
16 HENRY OF LANCASTER: Fowler, King’s Lieutenant, 106–10.
17 ENGUERRAND IN THE PICARDY CAMPAIGN: Chron. 4 Valois, 41. For this campaign see
also Chron. Jean de Venette and Denie.
18 JEAN’S SEIZURE OF CHARLES OF NAVARRE AND EXECUTION OF NORMAN NOBLES: all the
chronicles and summary in Delachenal, I, 140–57. 143 . BATTLE OF POITIERS:
On the English side the chief sources are Anonimalle, Chandos Herald,
Godfrey le Baker; and on the French side, Grandes Chrons., Chron. 4 Valois,
Chron. normande, Froissart. Hewitt’s Black Prince is the most thorough recent

account; Tourneur-Aumont devotes a whole book to it, infused with a special
thesis; Delachenal, Denie, Lot, and MacKinnon give full accounts.
19 TALLEYRAND DE PERIGORD: Zacour, 8, 24.
20 SIRE DE FERTÉ-FRESNEL: Delachenal, I, 397.
21 RUINED KNIGHTS: for documents illustrating these cases, see Moisant, 59–61;
Delachenal, I, 248, n.
22 “COMPLAINT OF THE BATTLE OF POITIERS”: Beaurepaire.
Chapter 7—Decapitated France:
The Bourgeois Rising and the Jacquerie
For the physical events of this chapter, from the meeting of the
Estates to the death of Marcel, the chief primary source is Chron. J.
& C, vol. I, with additional material from Chron. 4 Valois, Chron.
normande, Jean de Venette, Jean le Bel, and Froissart. These are
supplemented by the notes of their respective editors and by the
modern accounts of Delachenal, vol. I, and Coville.
1 ROBERT LE COQ’S LIBRARY: Autrand, 1220.
2 DAUPHIN’S BASTARD SONS: Chron. normande, 136; Delachenal, I, no, n. 2. GOSSIP
ABOUT HIS PATERNITY: ibid., 68, 69, n. 2.
3 MARCEL’S UNCLE, FATHER- AND BROTHER-IN-LAW: Cazelles, “Etienne Marcel,” 415–17.
4 FINANCE OFFICERS “WHO TRAVEL IN POMP”: Mézières, Coopland, I, 417–18. Renart le
Contrefait: q. Evans, Life, 42.
5 TAX SURVEY OF 1292: Franklin, Vie privée, I, 12; Evans, ibid., 49–50.
6. CONDITIONS OF PARIS: Franklin, Rues, Dict., Vie privée, VII, 12–13; Batifol;
Hillairet; Legrand; Coulton, Panorama, 308; Coville, 427–28. 160 ENGLISH
VISITOR ON BOOKSELLERS: q. Evans, ibid., 131.
7 GRAND ORDINANCE: Coville, 119–21.

8 FREE COMPANIES: Luce, Jacquerie, 9–28; Denie, passim; Gray, Scalacronica,
130–31; Gregorovius, 317 .; Delachenal, II, 28. “WRITE SORROW ON THE BOSOM
OF THE EARTH”: Shakespeare, Richard 11, act III, sc. 2.
9 FRA MONREALE: Gregorovius, 356–66; Hale, Higheld & Smalley, 102–3; Oman,
293.
10 Società dell’ acquisito: Lot, 397, n. 1. CERVOLE RECEIVED BY THE POPE: Luce-F, V,
95; Gregorovius, 395.
11 KNOLLYS: DNB.
12 EUSTACHE D’AUBRECICOURT: Luce-F, V, 160; Delachenal, II, 40–42.
13 “TRAGIC ACCOUNT”: M. L. Delisle, Tragicum Argumentum.
14 JEAN’S ENTRY INTO LONDON: John of Reading, 206; Brute Chron., q. Green, 197.
15 HIS EXPENDITURES AS A CAPTIVE: Orléans, 29, 42–43; Delachenal, II, 78–79;
Putnam, 312; Gazeau.
16 MICHELET’S COMMENT: III, 360.
17 ENGUERRAND ACCOMPANIES CHARLES OF NAVARRE: Chron. 4 Valois, 64; see also
Cazelles, “Parti navarrais.” 171 . CONDITIONS OF THE PEASANT: H. See, 540–624;
Bloch, Rural, 80–94; Perroy, “Wage Labour”; Mollat & Wol, 19–20; Davis,
268–70; Fossier, 358–59; Horizon, 238; Helen Robbins; Turner, “Ec.
Discontent”; Viollet-le-Duc, Dict., VI, 292; Bell, Old German Epics.
18 COST OF PLOW: Fossier to author.
19 “BATHING WAS COMMON”: Gasquet, 64. DIET: Luce, Guesclin, 57; Thrupp, 483;
Contamine, 654; Horizon, 238.
20 COMFORTABLE PEASANT OF NORMANDY: Duby, 518–19. DOWRIES: Mollat & Wol,
17–20.
21Merlin Merlot: Joly, 452–53. DEMONS REFUSE TO CARRY HIS SOUL: ibid., 458.
22 Le Despit au Vilain: ibid., 460–61.
23 JACQUERIE: For the outbreak and subsequent events, the major source is Luce,
Jacquerie, invaluable for its documentation of royal pardons issued after the
event, which, in the course of stating the circumstances in each case, gives a
picture more true to life than the chronicles. In addition, Chron. Jean le Bel, II,

256; KL, VI, 44–58; Chron J. & C., I, 177–78; Chron. normande, 127–28;
Chron. 4 Valois; Chron. Jean de Venette.
24 ATTACK AT MEAUX: KL, VI, 477; Chron. J. & C, 180–84.
25 NOBLES APPEAL TO CHARLES OF NAVARRE: Luce, Jacquerie, 147.
26 COUCY’S PRESENCE: Chron. 4 Valois, 74. According to the terms of the
subsequent Treaty of Calais in 1360, the persons who followed Charles of
Navarre “during the troubles” were to receive pardons from the King of
France. Coucy’s name does not appear either in the list of 300 persons who
had been followers of Charles or in a second list of 300 who received pardons
from King Jean: Secousse, II, 177–81, 181–85.
27 “THEY FLUNG THEMSELVES”: Chron. Jean de Venette.
28 “20,000” KILLED: Secousse, Mem. 239.
29 COUCY GUARDS HIS TERRITORY: Chron. Jean le Bel, II, 277; KL, VI, 99.
30 “DID NOT LIKE THE SAID BISHOP”: Chron. Jean le Bel, II, 260; Denie, 224.
Chapter 8—Hostage in England
1 COUCY NAMED HOSTAGE IN TREATY OF LONDON: Delachenal, II, 408. “THEY SAID THE
TREATY WAS DISPLEASING”: q. ibid., 87.
2 EDWARD’S EXPEDITIONARY FORCE: Knighton, q. Locke, 53; Hewitt, Edw., 31, 51, 88;
Fowler, Lanc, 198–200.
3 “AS THE STARRES HAVE INFLUENCE TO PRODUCE”: Sir Richard Baker, Chron. of Kings of
England, q. Barnie, 104.
4 FRENCH RAID ON WINCHELSEA: Gray, Scalacronica, 152; Orléans, 50–51,
Delachenal, II, 158.
5 ENGLAND IN A PANIC: from the Calendar of Close Rolls, q. Hewitt, Edw., 19.
6 BLACK MONDAY, “FOUL DARK DAY”: Chron. of London, q. Thompson, 101; Knighton
and Eulogium, q. Delachenal, II, 191.

7 PDESIGNATION OF HOSTAGES: Chron. 4 Valois, 122; Chron. normande, 155, n. 190
TREATY OF BRÉTIGNY: the text occupies 33 pages in Chron. J. & C., I, 267–300.
See also Duckett, 7–8. COUCY’S CONTRIBUTION TO RANSOM: Lépinois, 165.
8 VISCONTI MARRIAGE: Chamberlin, 31–35; Cook, 49 . VILLANI QUOTED: ibid., 49, n.
55.
9 PHILIP THE BOLD EARNS HIS NAME: Froissart.
10 FROISSART SAILS WITH THE HOSTAGES: Shears, 12–13. WALTER SCOTT: Old Mortality,
chap. 35.
11 CHAUCER WITH THE HOSTAGES, and HIS RANSOM: Coulton, Chaucer, 25–26.
12 “COUCY SHINED IN DANCING”: KL, VI, 392.
13 GOD OF LOVE IN Roman de la Rose: lines 2140–53, 2166–72.
14 POSTHUMOUS PORTRAIT: now in the Museum of Soissons. DUC D’ORLÉANS’ 16
SERVANTS: Coulton, Chaucer, 33.
15 FROISSART ON THE GERMANS: Luce-F, V, 289.
16 KING EDWARD NOT FLUENT IN ENGLISH: Coulton, Panorama, 237. ENGLISH COMPLAINT
OF 1340: q. Darmesteter, 13. JOHN OF TREVISA: q. Gasquet, 234; Campbell, 177.
17 “ARRAYED AS FOR WAR” and STATUTE OF 1362: Hewitt, Edw., 175.
18 PLAGUE OF 1361: Chron. 4 Valois, 130–31; John of Reading, 150, 364;
Polychronicon, 411; Saltmarsh; Carpentier, Ville; G. Mollat, Papes, 106;
Coville, 160–61.
19 PROPHECY OF JEAN DE LA ROQUETAILLADE: Chron. Jean de Venette, 61–62; Cohn,
105–6.
20 LONDON, ONE-THIRD EMPTY, and SANITATION: Sabine.
21 BUXEAUL: Duby, 523.
22 DESOLATION OF CHURCHES: M. Mollat, Vie, 4, 9. UNIVERSITY OF MONTPELLIER:
Campbell, 156–57.
23 PETRARCH’S ACCOUNT OF FRANCE: text from his Epistolae de Rebus Familiaribus in
Cook, 23–24. MISSION FROM GALEAZZO AND ORATION AT COURT: Wilkins, 217–24.

24 DAUPHIN’S SORROWS and NAVARRE’S POISON PLOT: Gr. Chrons., VI, 166, 222;
Delachenal, II, 268–69.
25 CITIZENS OF LA ROCHELLE AND CAHORS: Froissart. ST. ROMAIN DE TARN:
26 Hewitt, Edw., 151.
27 RINGOIS OF ABBEVILLE: Gr. Chrons., VI, 91; Delachenal, II, 178, n. 4.
28 TREATY OF THE “LILIES” AND COUCY: Letters of King Jean naming Coucy and other
correspondence in this matter are collected in Rymer, 72, 694, 700, 702; see
also Lehoux, I, 171.
29 FIGHT AT BRIGNAIS: Lot, 404–5; Cox, 164.
30 JEAN CONSIDERS MARRYING JOANNA OF NAPLES: Orléans, H.D., Notes et documents.
31 JEAN’S RETURN TO CAPTIVITY: KL, la, 119; Duckett, 9; Delachenal, II, 351.
32 JEAN’S DEATH AND FUNERAL: Chron J. & C, I, 339–41; Michelet, III, 368.
Chapter 9—Enguerrand and Isabella
1 I SABELLA: The facts of Isabella’s life, household, possessions, and nances are
in Green, 164–228, who collected them from extensive original research in
the Wardrobe Accounts, Close Rolls, Pipe Rolls, and various contemporary
English chronicles. On Isabella’s character, see Hardy, 168, 182.
2 BÉRARD D’ALBRET: KL, Biog. Index, XX, 20.
3 “ONLY FOR LOVE”: Poly chronic on, 365. JOAN OF RENT: KL, II, 243.
4 LADIES IN MALE ATTIRE AT TOURNAMENTS: Knighton, q. J. Cammidge, The Black
Prince, 1943, 108.
5 PLUCKING EYEBROWS: La Tour Landry, 96.
6 DUENNA’S ADVICE IN Roman de la Rose: lines 13,879–14,444, trans, in Herlihy,
Med. Culture.
7 AGNES AND MACHAUT: Machaut, xiv, xvii. CHASTITY BELT: Dingwall, 4, 76, 160.
DESCHAMPS, “Suis-je belle?”: q. Cohen, Vie, 293–95.

8 JEAN DE CONDÉ’S TALE: Hellman & O’Gorman, 24–25. OTHER fabliaux: ibid., also
Brians, Bawdy Tales.
9 VINCENT DE BEAUVAIS: q. Owst, 378.
10 PETRARCH RENOUNCES THE FLESH: Correspondence, 62, 92, 403. “WHERESOEVER
BEAUTY SHOWS”: Master Rypon, a 14th century preacher, q. Owst, 48.
11 QUESTIONS OF SEX AND SIN: Noonan, 249, 274, 279, 283, 293–94.
12 SODOMY “AGAINST NATURE” AND “WORST OF SINS”: Aquinas, Summa Theologica, q.
Noonan, 339–40.
13 ILLUMINATED MS. DEPICTING IRE AS A WOMAN: Mâle, 331–33. AQUINAS ON WOMAN’S
PLACE: Summa Theologica, q. Jarrett, Social, 72, 74. BONET, “MAN IS NOBLER”: 194.
14 DUNMOW FLITCH: For text of the oath, see Reader’s Encyclopedia, ed. W. R.
Benét, New York, 1948.
15 NUNS “LIKE DOGS CHAINED UP TOO MUCH”: q. Jarrett, Social, 82. WOMEN’S DEATH RATE:
J. C. Russell, Fontana, 29.
16 JACOBA FELICIE: Power, 422. NOVELLA D’ANDREA: Will Durant, Story of Civilization,
V, 4.
17 MARCIA ORDELAFFI: Emerton, 177–87.
18 217CHRISTINE DE PISAN: Coville, 410–11. POEM ON WIDOWHOOD: ibid, (trans. BT).
19 OTHER WORKS AND POEMS: Huizinga, Waning, 111–12, 123, 286.
20 CONTROVERSY ON Roman de la Rose: Kilgour, 136; Masson, 174.
21 ON JOAN OF ARC: Jarrett, Social, 86.
22 MARRIAGE OF ENGUERRAND AND ISABELLA: documents in Rymer, 773, 778. A LADY’S
CARRIAGE: Avenel, 49–50; Jusserand, 48–49.
23 ENGUERRAND MADE EARL OF BEDFORD: Issue Rolls, 40 Edw. Ill, q. Green, 206; also
Barnes, 667, 670.
24 COUCY ACQUIRES SOISSONS: KL, VII, 232–34.

Chapter 10—Sons of Iniquity
1 ONE OF THE WORST OF THE CAPTAINS, he was Anichino Baumgarten: Cox, 138–40.
2 PHILIP OF BURGUNDY AND ARNAUT DE CERVOLE: Zurlauben, Cervole, 162.
3 BERTUCAT D’ALBRET: KL, XI, 228. SEGUIN DE BADEFOL: ibid., XX, 232–36. AIMERIGOT
MARCEL: ibid., XIV, 164.
4 INNOCENT vi, PASTORAL LETTER: M. Mollat, Vie, 5, 30. “IF GOD HIMSELF WERE A
SOLDIER”: q: Kilgour, 26. COMPANIES DEMAND PAPAL ABSOLUTION: Denie, 185.
5 HAWKWOOD: Leader-Temple & Marcotti and Gaupp, passim, “NOTHING WAS MORE
TERRIBLE”: q. Leader-Temple & Marcotti, 27. “Perdi sceleratissimi”: ibid., 14.
“DID NOT ROAST AND MUTILATE”: q. Stanley, 401.
6 “AN ITALIANIZED ENGLISHMAN”: q. Gaupp, 308.
7 CUVELIER ON DU GUESCLIN: i, 5. In the opinion of Edouard Perroy (Hundred
Years, 148), Du Guesclin “enjoyed a popularity out of all proportion to his
talents and exploits.… [He was] a mediocre captain, incapable of winning a
battle or being successful in a siege of any scope … swollen with self-
importance.” See also Michelet, IV, 4.
8 BATTLE OF COCHEREL: Luce-F, VI, 131; Lot, 436.
9 DU GUESCLIN AND ASTROLOGERS: Lewis, 26; Thorndike, III, 586. CHARLES V AND SAME:
Campbell, 128; Pernoud, 224.
10 THOMAS OF PISANO: Thorndike, II, 801–2; III, 611, 615.
11 ENRIQUE ELDEST OF FATHER’S TEN BASTARDS: Chron. Jean de Venette. Notes, 304, n.
2.
12 “THE TYRANNY OF RHYME”: Delachenal, III, 455.
13 DU GUESCLIN, CARDINAL, ET AL. AT VILLENEUVE: Cuvelier, verses 7530–7620, trans,
in D. F. Jamison, Life and Times of Bertrand du Guesclin, 1864, 260–65.
14 BLACK PRINCE ENCOURAGED TROOPS “UNDERHAND”: Froissart, Johnes ed., I, 383. “DID
SO MUCH DAMAGE”: ibid.
15 “HE DID NOT VALUE A KNIGHT”: Cuvelier, q. Sedgwick, 195–97.

Chapter 11—The Gilded Shroud
1 COUCY’S CHARTER OF LIBERTIES: text in Melleville, 103–6.
2 CHÂTEAU OF HESDIN, MECHANICAL JOKES: Vaughan, 205.
3 SWAN FESTIVAL OF PICARDY: Le Grand d’Aussy, II, 23.
4 FORKS, listed in an inventory of Charles V’s household in 1379: Le Grand
d’Aussy, III, 179.
5 TROUSSEAU OF BLANCHE DE BOURBON: Evans, Flowering, 174.
6 “BUSYING THEMSELVES WITH OTHER THINGS”: q. Coulton, Life, I, 204. COMMUNION
WAFERS’ MAGICAL POWERS: Lea, I, 50.
7 COMMUNION AND CONFESSION ONCE A YEAR: M. Mollat, Vie, 72. “THIS I
8 KNEW NOT”: Jacques de Vitry, q. Coulton, Life, I, 57. RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCE IN
NORTHERN FRANCE: M. Mollat, Vie, 72–73. CHARLES v: Christine de Pisan, Charles
V, passim; Coville, 183–85. TAILLEVENT: Evans, Flowering, 172
9 47 JEWELED CROWNS: Vaughan.
10 PCHARLES v’s ILLNESSES AND ABSCESS: KL, IX, 280–82; Delachenal, I, 14; II, 306–
11. Froissart’s account, according to Delachenal, V, 389, is a “tissue of
fables.”
11 PCHARLES v’s LIBRARY: Christine de Pisan, Charles V, II, 13; Coville, 189.
12 CLARENCE’S RETINUE: Cook (a study in detail of the entire aair), CLARENCE IN
PARIS: Chron. J. & C., II, 41; Rymer, 845. VISITED BY COUCY: Green, 208.
13 AMADEUS’ PURCHASES: Cordey, 184–85.
14 VISCONTI FAMILY: Chamberlin, 15–30, 67–70; also Cook, 16, 18; Muir, 70.
15 CASTLE OF PAVÍA: Corio, Storia di Milano, q. Chamberlin, 119. “FINEST DWELLING”:
J. A. Symonds, Age of Despots, q. Cook, 43. PETRARCH: Correspondence, 323–25.
16 MILAN: Mesquita, 2–3; Chamberlin, 13–15; Molho, 30.
17 WEDDING: Cook; Chamberlin, 42–43. For presence of Froissart and Chaucer,
see Jarrett, Charles IV, 5, and Coulton, Chaucer, 48, 50.
18 KING EDWARD’S OFFER TO PLEDGE CALAIS: Vaughan, 5.

19 COUCY SELLS BURGUNDY PEARL NECKLACE: Luce, Cent ans, I, 96.
20 PHILIP OF BURGUNDY’S HABITS: Luce, Cent ans, II, 206; Petit, Itinéraires,
21 Vaughan, 6, 197.
22 COUCY “FINEST SHOWING”: Luce-F, VII, 130.
23 PETRARCH TO BOCCACCIO: Correspondence, 213–14.
Chapter 12—Double Allegiance
1 CHARLES CONSULTS UNIVERSITIES: Chaplais, 55.
2 “SORE TROUBLED IN THEIR MYNDES”: Froissart. BONET ON DOUBLE ALLEGIANCE: 167–68.
3 COUCY’S HAPSBURG INHERITANCE: Duplessis, 119–20; Zurlauben, Enguerrand VII,
170–73, has collected the evidence; also Lacaille, thèse, 17–20.
4 COUCY’S SEAL OF 1369: AN, Service des sceaux; No. 308 in Demay, Flandre,
attached to a document of 14 November 1369 stamped Sigillum Engueranni
lii ducisse Austrie domini de Couciaco et comitis Suessionensis et Bedfordis. Bears
the device Semper. A similar seal of 1376 (No. 8644 in Demay, Clairembault)
bears the device Sans plus and shows a shield quartered 1 and 4 vairé and 2
and 3 fascé. Anselme, 542, gives a further description of Coucy’s seals with
the upright gure.
5 CONTRACT WITH MONTBÉLIARD, and MANIFESTO TO STRASBOURG AND COLMAR: KL, VIII,
cxxx, n. 3; Bardy, 13–14.
6 DOCUMENT DATED PRAGUE: mentioned by Galbraith in notes to Anonimalle Chron.,
117. Copied for the author at the Public Record Oce (Memoranda Roll, 13
Richard II, Michaelmas Communia, Recorda, fourth membrane after 19), the
document is an “inspection” made in 1390 of earlier letters patent to
Robersart, and repeats the full text of Coucy’s letter given under his seal “at
Prague in Bohemia on the 14th day of January of the year 1369 [1370].” p.
248 ITALY INFESTED BY BRIGANDS: John Bromyard, q. Owst, 174; Origo, 153, 275–
76.

7 BERNABÒ VERSUS THE PAPACY: Gregorovius, 408; Milman, VIII, 14–16. PUBLIC
ATTRIBUTED URBAN’S ELECTION TO GOD: Milman, VIII, 13.
8 URBAN’S RETURN: ibid., 20; Jarrett, Charles IV, 156. CONDITION OF ROME: Pirenne,
Europe, 23–24; Flick, 213.
9 ENGUERRAND WITH COUNT OF SAVOY IN ITALY: Cox, 264–68; Cognasso, 197; Gabotto,
201–2.
10 PASSAGE OF THE ALPS: Cox, The Eagles of Savoy, Princeton, 1974, 339–43.
11 VILLANI ON HAWKWOOD’S COMPANY: This is Filippo Villani, q. Cook, 25.
12 ORDERS OF visconti’s PARENTS: q. Chamberlin, 58.
13 PAPAL CORRESPONDENCE AND CONTRACTS WITH COUCY: Lacaille, An. Bull. SHF, 187–
206, gives the full texts from the Vatican Archives.
14. CAMPAIGN OF THE PAPAL LEAGUE and BATTLE OF MONTICHIARI: Annales
Mediolanensis in Muratori’s RIS, chaps, cxxxv–vi, 752–56 (trans, for the
author by Phyllis G. Gordan); Corio, Historia di Milano, q. Mazas, 187–90;
Servion, 198–205; Leader-Temple & Marcotti, 72–78; Lacaille, thèse, 26–31;
Cox, 276–77; Chamberlin, 58–60; Cognasso, 208.
15 TITLE OF SIRE DE COUCY HELD HIGH: KL, Ib, 17, n. 5.
16 APPOINTED MARSHAL: Luce-F, VIII, cxxxii.
17 NEUTRALITY HELD HONORABLE: KL, VIII, 291–93. CHEVALIER DE CHIN: ibid., 21, 24.
18 BATTLE OF ENRIQUE AND PEDRO: Luce-F, VII, XXXII, N. 1.
19 BLACK PRINCE’S ILLNESS: That it was dropsy is stated by Denie, 497, and
Lefranc, 108. English biographers avoid naming this unheroic malady.
20 BATTLE OF LA ROCHELLE: In addition to Froissart and Chron. 4 Valois, Roncière,
15–16; Sherborne; Runyan.
21 CAPTAL DE BUCH HELD IN PRISON: Chron. J. & C., III, 62–78; Keen, Laws, 90;
Delachenal, III, 186–87.
22 COUCY INTERCEDES: KL, VIII, 401–2.
23 LANCASTER’S LONG MARCH: Walsingham, q. MacKinnon, 552; Lot, 367–68;
Delachenal, III, 302.

Chapter 13—Coucy’s War
1 BURGUNDY’S EXPENSES: Delachenal, IV, 568.
2 PROPOSAL TO COUCY TO LEAD COMPANIES: KL, VIII, 369, 372. RIVIÈRE, MERCIER:
Lefranc, 217–18; Coville, 220.
3 COUCY LENT MONEY TO BERRY: Lehoux, I, 358, n. 3.
4 BRETON COMPANIES AND THE POPE: Mirot, “Budes,” 590; Denie, 583.
5 OWEN OF WALES: Chotzen. COUCY’S CONTRACT WITH HIM: ibid., 236.
6 CANNON AT SIEGE OF ST. SAUVEUR: Chron. 4 Valois, 253; Delachenal, IV, 527–28.
7 PALSATIAN CHRONICLE: Koenigshofen, 334–35.
8 COUCY’S CHANTRIES AT NOGENT: BN, Fonds fr., nouv. acq. no. 3653, no. 293, and a
later “vidimus” of this document, nouv. acq. fr. 20510, pièce 48. CAPTAL’S
MASSES: Lewis, 204.
9 PRINCESS OF WALES’ THREE PRIESTS: Rosenthal, 15.
10 COUCY’S LETTERS TO IMPERIAL VICAR AND CITIES: Bardy, 17; Zurlauben, Enguerrand
VII, 177.
11 RAVAGES IN ALSACE: Bardy, 23–25.
12 . INVASION OF THE AARGAU: Sources for the Swiss campaign are: Dierauer,
287–92; Dandliker, 547–52; Muller, 201–18 (translated for the author by
Kathie Coblenz); also Bardy, 17–29; Chotzen, 234–38; Laguille, 309–10;
Zurlauben, 177–80. Chotzen includes a list of the original Swiss chronicles.
13 MORGARTEN AND LAUPEN: Oman, 235–46.
14 FROISSART’S VERSION: KL, VIII, 376–78.
15 FRAUBRUNNEN, BALLADS ON THE BATTLE: R. Liliencron, ed., Die Historischen
Volkslieder des Deutschen vom 13 bis 16 Jahrhundert, Leipzig, 1865, I, 88–90;
Chotzen, 238.
16 FRAUBRUNNEN, INSCRIPTION ON STONE MONUMENT: copied by the author and
translated by Prof. E. A. R. Brown.

17 HAPSBURG SETTLEMENT WITH COUCY: Delachenal, IV, 583, n. 5; Zurlauben,
Enguerrand VII, 180 (who undertakes to dispose of the errors of all previous
historians).
18 COUCY COMMISSIONED TO ACT AGAINST COMPANIES: Delachenal, IV, 584, n. 1;
Lehoux, I, 380, n. 9.
19 EDWARD’S GRANTS TO ISABELLA: Green, 213–16. ALICE PERRERS: Chron. Angl.,
Thompson, xlviii.
20 “LADY OF THE SUN”: q. Green, 210, n. 2.
21 COUCY’S FRIENDS URGE HIM TO TURN FRENCH, and HIS MISSION TO ENGLAND: KL, VIII,
378–80. On double allegiance, see Keen, Laws, 89–91.
Chapter 14—England’s Turmoil
The major contemporary narrative source for English aairs in this
period is Thomas Walsingham’s Chronicon Angliae, which
unfortunately does not exist in English (although Thompson’s notes
are useful). Those like myself not uent in Latin must depend on
quotations and excerpts in English by other historians. The
somewhat less lively Anonimalle Chronicle has been translated by V.
H. Galbraith. Secondary sources on the condition of England used
for this chapter are Jusserand, McKisack, Postan, Saltmarsh,
Seebohm, and Trevelyan. Although the last, which was Trevelyan’s
rst book, may lag behind modern scholarship, it is far ahead in
general interest and a comprehensive view of the social milieu.
1 “NOT STRONGER IN MIND THAN A BOY OF EIGHT”: Chron. Angl., q. Collis, 186, n. 2.
2 “WHEREBY THE JUSTICES BE AFRAID”: a statute of 2 Rich. II, q. Jusserand, 76.
3 BISHOP OF ROCHESTER: q. ibid., 86.
4 COMMONS COMPLAIN OF LABORERS AND SERVANTS: Jusserand, 147–48, from Rymer,
V, 668.
5 “GATHER TOGETHER IN GREAT ROUTS”: q. Seebohm, 274.

6 FOUR VILLAGES OF GLOUCESTER: Beresford & Hurst, 8. FIVE CHURCHES OF NORFOLK:
Saltmarsh, 24.
7 WYCLIF: Poole; Trevelyan, passim; Cheyney, 211–24.
8 PRIESTS LICENSED TO KEEP A CONCUBINE: MacKinnon, 563. CONFESSOR IN CASES OF
ADULTERY: Lea, I, 31.
9 EUCHARIST WITHHELD: ibid., 28. MISBEHAVIOR OF CLERICS: Coulton, Life, I, 96, 99–
100. WORLDLY CLERICS’ CLOTHING: Jusserand, 55.
10 LOLLARDY AMONG THE NOBLES: Cheyney, 217.
11 Horribles expenses: q. McKisack, 386, n. 1.
12 PURVEYORS “SEIZE ON MEN”: J. R. Green, Short History of England, I, 455–56.
13 GOOD PARLIAMENT: In addition to sources at head of chapter, MacKinnon;
Harold I. Nelson, “Thomas Walsingham and the Crisis of 1376” (unpublished
ms.); A. F. Pollard; Powell & Wallis; Stubbs’ Constitutional History.
14 COUCY AS EARL OF BEDFORD: A search of the Close Rolls, Parl. Rolls, and Parl.
Writs made for the author at the Public Record Oce disclose no evidence
that Coucy was summoned to or attended the Parliament of 1376, although
he was summoned as Earl of Bedford to the Parliament of 43 Edw. Ill (1370)
(The Dignity of a Peer of the Realm; Reports from the Lords’ Committees …,
London, 1829, IV, 645).
15 ISABELLA AND COUCY VISIT BLACK PRINCE: KL, VIII, 379.
16 HIS DEATHBED, WILL, AND MONUMENT: Chandos Herald, 170; Chron. Angl., q.
Trevelyan, 27; Collins, 300–301; DNB.
17 COUCY ADVISES INVASION: Froissart, q. Lépinois, 178.
18 KING EDWARD’S PHYSICIANS “DESPAIRED”: Anonimalle, 95. COUCY’S MISSION TO
FLANDERS: Lacaille, thèse, 40.
19 QUEEN’S ILLNESS: Chron. 4 Valois, 244; Delachenal, IV, 536. PAYMENTS TO COUCY:
BN, Pièces originales, 875, dossier 19, 660 Coucy. MARIE DE COUCY: Lehoux, I,
392, 398, n. 7.
20 COUCY IN PARLEYS WITH THE ENGLISH: KL, VIII, 383–84; Barnes, 906–7.

21 CHAUCER’S PRESENCE: Braddy; Manley; also F. N. Robinson, Introduction to
Chaucer’s Complete Works.
22 SUBSTANCE OF THE PARLEYS: Delachenal, V, 4; Delisle, Coll. BE, No. 1425; Perroy,
“Anglo-French.”
23 EDWARD’S DEATH; JUBILEE YEAR PASSED UNNOTICED: J. J. Jusserand, Piers Plowman,
London, 1894, 53.
24 ISABELLA’S MOVEMENTS: KL, XXI, 41; Green, 215–17, from Rymer, VII, 153.
25 ROBERSART: Collins, 237, 249.
26Songe du Vergier: q. Delachenal, IV, 601–2 DIALOGUE WRITTEN BY D’AILLY: q.
Kirkland, 18.
27 COUCY’S LETTER OF RENUNCIATION: text in KL, XXI, 41–42, and in Rymer, VII,
172, from Patent Roll, 1 Richard II.
28 TRUSTEESHIP FOR ISABELLA: DNB; Green, 219, from Rymer, IV, 60; Hardy, 309.
29 ESTATES SETTLED ON PHILIPPA: Lacaille, “Vente,” 574, n. 1. FRENCH RAIDS AND EFFECT
ON ENGLAND: Searle & Burghart.
30 SIR JOHN ARUNDEL AND LANCASTER: Chron. Angl., q. ibid., 382, and in Delachenal,
V, 30.
Chapter 15—The Emperor in Paris
1 CHARLES IV, CHARACTER AND APPEARANCE: Matteo Villani, q. Cox, 189; Jarrett,
Charles IV, 219–24.
2 WELCOMING PARTY AT CAMBRAI, and SUBSEQUENT ACCOUNT OF THE EMPEROR’S VISIT:
Chron. J. & C., II, 200–276; Christine de Pisan, Charles V, II, 90–132.
3 CHANCELLOR’S CHRONICLER: Pierre d’Orgement, the Chancellor, is believed to
have supervised, or possibly himself written, the Chron. J. & C.: Delachenal, I,
xviii.
4 BANQUET DISHES: from menus listed by the Ménagier, 226–36.
5 VISIT TO SAVOY, PLATTERS SERVED ON LANCES: Cox, 197.

6 BANQUET BY vidame DE CHARTRES: Le Grand d’Aussy, III, 343. DRAMA AND
STAGECRAFT: Mâle, 36–37; Artz, 356–60; Cohen, Theatre, 49, 93–94, 99, 162,
273; Gayley, 33–34, 75–80, 214, 263–64; Frank, 115–35; A. W. Pollard, xli.
313 LOLLARD PREACHER: q. A. W. Pollard, xxii.
7 SIEGE OF JERUSALEM STAGED: in addition to the primary accounts, Loomis.
8 BEAUTÉ-SUR-MARNE: Luce, Cent ans, II, 41–44.
9 GREAT THEOLOGIAN ON CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED: Jean Gerson, q. Lewis, 94.
10 BRETHREN OF THE FREE SPIRIT: Chron. J. & C., II, 163–64; Cohn, chap. 8; Le.
11 BÉGUINES A RETREAT FROM “MARITAL BONDS”: Southern, 329. BIBLE IN FRENCH: Cohn,
161.
12 ANJOU, “THE WORLD BROUGHT TO NOTHING”: q. Campbell, 151.
13 DEMONOLOGY AND SORCERY: Lea, III, 464; J. B. Russell, 208–14; P. Hughes,
passim.
14 ORESME: Thorndike, III, 428–38, 466–68; q. Coopland in notes to Mézières, 1,
25.
Chapter 16—The Papal Schism
Based on the Italian and French chroniclers, the two major modern
authorities for the events of this chapter are Valois, vol. I, and
Ullman, supplemented by Creighton, Flick, McFarlane, and of course
Delachenal, especially for the role of Charles V. Sources other than
these are cited below. All quotations from St. Catherine are from
Jorgensen, unless otherwise cited.
1 ABBOT OF MONTMAYEUR: Sismondi, IV, 412.
2 Based“FOR WITH NO OTHER QUARREL”: The French governor quoted was Marshal
Boucicaut. Godefroy, Boucicaut, 2–3.
3 “AS IF THESE TIMES”: Neri di Donato, q. Jorgensen, 171.

4 ROBERT OF GENEVA: Valois, I, 109; conicting versions of his appearance are
from Muratori and the chronicler Dietrich of Niem, q. Ullman, 163.
5 BRETONS’ SWORDS BLESSED BY THE CARDINAL: Mirot, “Budes.” MASSACRE OF CESENA:
Leader-Temple & Marcotti, 110–22. “Sangue et sangue!”: Lot, 417; Sismondi,
IV, 422.
6 BERNABÒ’S DAUGHTER MARRIES HAWKWOOD: Leader-Temple & Marcotti, 126.
7 “MAN OF BLOOD” and “BUTCHER OF CESENA”: Delachenal, V, 143. “PEOPLE NO LONGER
BELIEVE”: q. ibid., 121.
8 JOHANNES TAULER: Mâle, 89, 107. ST. BRIGITTA: ibid., 89–90.
9 CATHERINE’S LETTER TO HAWKWOOD: q. Leader-Temple & Marcotti, 82–83.
CATHERINE IN AVIGNON: Delachenal, IV, 598.
10 ON THE RETURN TO ROME: from the Carrier edition of her letters, q. ibid., 596,
nn. 3, 4, 5.
11 ECCLESIASTICAL EXTORTIONS, IN GERMANY: CMH, 280. PRIESTS DESERTED: ibid, AS
TAVERNERS AND HORSE-DEALERS: M. Mollat, Vie, 43. BRIGITTA, “FEAR OF GOD”: q.
Jorgensen, 160. CATHERINE ON REFORM: q. Ullman, 60–61.
12 CHARLES v, “ROME IS WHEREVER”: q. Renouard, Papacy, 64.
13 GREGORY’S RETURN TO ROME: Froissart, Berners ed., II, 505; Jarrett, Charles IV,
200–11, HIS FATHER: Jorgensen, 237. ONE OF HIS BISHOPS: Renouard, Papacy, 66.
14 URBAN REGARDED AS MAD: Ullman, 53; Creighton, 83; Cath. Encyc.
15 MICHELET, “NO EPOCH MORE NATURALLY MAD”: IV, 8.
16 “OH, UNHAPPY MEN”: q. Ullman, 67–68.
17 JUAN 1, “WHAT GOVERNMENT”: q. Delachenal, V, 171.
18 EFFECTS OF THE SCHISM: Chron. C6, I, 85–87; Michelet, IV, 8; Huizinga, Waning,
21.
19 BONET ON THE SCHISM: 92–93.
20 MONK OF ST. DENIS, “LIKE A PROSTITUTE”: Chron. C6, I, 91.
21 ANJOU AND CLEMENT AND KINGDOM OF ADRIA: Valois, I, 145, 167–68; Durrieu,
“Adria.”

22 UNIVERSITY RESISTS and ARREST OF ROUSSE: Chron. C6, I, 87.
23 WYCLIF ON INDIVIDUAL SALVATION: q. Trevelyan, 141.
24 NO ONE HAD ENTERED PARADISE: q. Huizinga, Waning, 29.
Chapter 17—Coucy’s Rise
1 KING “SORROWED LONG”: Gr. Chrons., q. Delachenal, V, 20.
2 FF, CHARLES OF NAVARRE’S TREASON AND PLOTS: Chron. J. & C., II, 286 ., and
documents in Secousse; Coville, 246–47; Delachenal, V, 180–218.
3 FOIX, “IMPETUOUS PASSIONS”: q. Tarbé in notes to Machaut, xix. AFFAIR OF GASTON:
Chron. C6, I, 365; also Froissart; and Tarbé, op cit.
4 NORMANDY CAMPAIGN: KL, IX, 56, 61–63, 77–78.
5 COUCY AND CLISSON: Lefranc, 189, 270. COMRADESHIP OF BROTHERHOOD-IN-ARMS: see
Keen, Laws, 138.
6 CLISSON’S CAREER: Lefranc, 24–37, 58–68, 132–34.
7 “ALWAYS IN PERFECT HARMONY”: ibid., 270. ASSASSINATION OF OWEN OF WALES:
Froissart, Berners ed., III, 15.
8 POLICY ON BRITTANY and TRIAL OF MONTFORT: Moranvillé, Mercier, 76–81;
Delachenal, V, 242–45.
9 COUCY AS A “PEER OF FRANCE”: Froissart says specically, in connection with
Coucy’s campaign in Italy in 1372–74, “et li uns des xii pers”: KL, VII, 419. On
the somewhat elastic nature of the twelve French peers, see Bloch, Feudal,
333–35; Lot & Fawtier, 297, n. 1.
10 KING’S VISIT TO COUCY: Chron. J. & C., III, 215; Lacaille, thèse, 59; Moranvillé,
Mercier, 70–72, 319.
11 DESCHAMPS: Coville, 401, 407–9; Gaston Raynaud, 27; intro. and notes to
Queux edition of Deschamps’ works, vol. XI. BALLADE ON COUCY: Deschamps, I,
269 (Trans. B.T.). PURCHASE OF GREAT FIEFS: see Lewis, 191.
12 MARRIAGE NEGOTIATIONS: Lehoux, I, 439.

13 COUCY’S ORDER OF THE CROWN: Deschamps, Queux ed., II, 35 (on the twelve
qualities of the crown), and IV, 115. Duplessis, 89; Zurlauben, Enguerrand VII,
183.
14 JOHN PHILPOT: Chron. Angl., q. Barnie, 108–9; McKisack, 403.
15 REVOLT OF GHENT, “ON THE FOLLIES OF PRINCES”: q. Hutton.
16. OPPRESSION AND UPRISING IN LANGUEDOC, and PUNISHMENT OF MONTPELLIER:
Chron. J. & C., II, 365–76; Delachenal, V, chap. 6.
17 “KILL ALL THE RICH!”: q. Mollat & Wol, 182. “CUT OPEN BODIES”: q. Delachenal,
V, 303, n. 3.
18 ENGLISH TAX OF 1379: Trevelyan, 100–103. MISCALCULATION OF THE TAX BASE: it
was derived from an estimate of the number of English parishes at 40,000–
50,000 when in fact they numbered about 9,000, see Coulton, Five Centuries,
III, 449.
19 ARUNDEL’S VOYAGE: Chron. Angl., q. Collis, 225–27, and DNB; Froissart, Berners
ed., III, 11; Roncière, 65–66. HIS 52 SUITS OF CLOTHES: Baldwin, 74. COMMONS’
PROTEST AND GOVERNMENT’S REPLY: Jusserand, 124–25, from Parl. Rolls, 2 Rich. II.
20 “ALL THE WITTE OF THIS WORLDE”: B text, xiii, 173.
21 COUCY OFFERED constableship: KL, IX, 237–38; Lefranc, 211–12. SCOPE OF THE
OFFICE: Vuatrin, 89–90; Lefranc, 230–31.
22 COUCY NAMED CAPT.-GEN. OF PICARDY and GIVEN MORTAIGNE: KL, IX, 243; Duchesne,
267; Duplessis, 91–92.
23 BUCKINGHAM EXPEDITION: KL, IX, 260–91; Chron. C6, I, 7. PREPARATIONS:
Sherborne, EHR.
24 CLISSON ON THE ENGLISH: KL, VIII, 302. “THEY CAN BETTER LIVE IN WAR”: KL, XIV,
314.
25 DOCUMENTS ON COUCY’S MOVEMENTS: Luce-F, xcix, n. 8. lmmobilis quasi lapis: q.
Coville, 264.
26 p. 362 , CHARLES v’s DEATHBED and THE PROBLEM OF TAXES: Coville in CMH,
265–66; Perroy, Hundred Years, 173–74; Delachenal, V, 408–10.
27 Songe du Vergier: q. Mirot, Urbaines, 6, n. 1. TEXT OF KING’S ORDINANCE: ibid., 4.

28 PRECEDENTS: Brown, “Taxation and Morality.”
29 “TO THEIR GREAT DISCOMFORT”: Anonimalle, q. Collis, 230.
Chapter 18—The Worms of the Earth Against the Lions
On the conditions, taxation, and sentiments of the working class, the
chief sources used for this chapter are Mollat & Wol, Ongles Bleues;
Turner, “Economic Discontent”; Perroy, “Wage Labour”; Pirenne,
Europe, 103–12; Boissonade, 303–7; Thompson, Econ. and Soc. Hist.;
Carpentier, Ville, 220–21.
For the Ciompi: Mollat & Wol, 144–62; Turner; Schevill,
Florence, 277–83; contemporary texts in Brucker, Society, 233–39.
For the insurrections in France and associated events, the chief
primary sources are: Chron. C6 by the Monk of St. Denis, vol. I
(especially for Paris), and Chron. 4 Valois (especially for Rouen),
plus Froissart in KL, IX. The most detailed secondary studies are
Mirot’s Insurrections urbaines and, for Rouen, Lecarpentier’s
“Harelle.”
On the Peasants’ Revolt in England, so much has been written that
it is hardly necessary to cite references except, for convenience,
McKisack, Trevelyan, Keen’s “Robin Hood,” and a good account in
Collis. The chief primary sources are Anonimalle, Malverne’s
continuation of Polychronicon, and Froissart.
For Ghent, Hutton should be added to the sources mentioned
above on the working class, and Froissart.
1 “LET HIM GO TO THE DEVIL!”: q. Luce-F, Notes, X, xliii.
2 LAON REFUSED COUCY: Lacaille, thèse, 64–65.
3 ANJOU TOOK 32 BOOKS: Delisle, Lib. Chas. V, 136–37. 369 “WORMS OF THE EARTH”:
q. Jacob, 192, and Origo, 66.
4 CARDINAL DE LA GRANGE: Chron. 4 Valois, 283; Jean Juvenal des Ursins, q.
Moranvillé, Mercier, 83–84, and Lefranc, 217.
5 COUCY PAYING SPIES: BN, Clairembault, vol. xxxv, No. 92.

6 “TOURNAMENTS OF THE RICH,” “EVIL PRINCES,” JOHN BROMYARD, FRANCISCAN FRIAR: q.
Owst, 293, 299, 301, 310–11.
7 “VILLEINS YE ARE”: q. McKisack, 418.
8 “DAYS OF WRATH AND ANGUISH”: Walsingham, q. ibid., 414.
9 “TOKENS OF GRETE VENGAUNCE”: T. Wright, Political Songs, I, 252. WALSINGHAM ON
FRENCH RAIDS: q. Barnie, 103. FLORENTINE DIARIST: Paolo Sassetti, q. Brucker,
Society, 42.
10 VILLANI, “IT SHOULD BE”: q. Mollat & Wol, 133–34. 381 BUONACCORSO PITTI: q.
Mollat & Wol, 172.
11 COUCY NEGOTIATES WITH THE REBELS: KL, IX, 447; Luce-F, X, xlv, n. 1; also Chron.
de Berne reprinted in KL, notes, X, 456–57; Mirot, Insurrections, 152–55.
COUCY’S hotel: Roussel, 24, n. 1, and Hillairet, Dict., entry under “St. Jean-en-
Grève.” p. 386 TUCHINS: Chron. €6; Boudet, passim; also Mollat & Wol, 10–
35, 184–85.
12 RIOTERS OF BÉZIERS IN PLOT: Mollat & Wol.
13. FLANDERS CAMPAIGN and BATTLE OF ROOSEBEKE: Chron. Bourbon (the author,
Chateaumorand, was a participant) in addition to Chron. C6, I, Chron. 4
Valois, and Froissart in KL, X; also Lot, 451–52, and Hutton.
14 COUCY’S RETINUE IN ARMY FOR FLANDERS: BN, Clairembault 35, pièce 2628, nos. 99
and 100.
15 COUCY PROPOSED AS CONSTABLE FOR THE BATTLE: KL, X, 160–63.
16 COUCY IN THE BATTLE OF ROOSEBEKE: in addition to Chron. Bourbon, Chron. de
Berne in KL, X, 477–79. 396 “THE SIRE DE COUCY HAD NOT FEARED”: KL, notes, X,
501.
17 DESCHAMPS, “THEREFORE THE INNOCENT”: q. Coulton, Life, 111, 112.
Chapter 19—The Lure of Italy
The chief contemporary sources for Anjou’s campaign for Naples are
Chron. C6, vol. I, and the Journal of Jean le Fèvre. The fullest

secondary account is in Valois, vol. II. Additional material from
Valeri, 230–31, and on Amadeus of Savoy from Cox, 330–37.
Coucy’s campaign in Italy is fully documented in Durrieu’s “Prise
d’Arezzo” (Bibliog. I, B) using the Documenti degli Archivi
Toscani … Comune di Firenze, published 1866, and other Italian
sources. Lacaille’s thèse adds material on the proceedings of the
Florentine Signoria taken from the Chronicle of Naddo da
Montecatini, in Delizie degli eruditi Toscani, vol. XVIII, Firenze, 1784.
The Chron. de Berne, reprinted in KL, XI, 442–43, and Jean le Fèvre
are further sources. As part of Anjou’s venture, Coucy’s campaign is
covered also in Valois, II.
1 BOCCACCIO ON NAPLES AND OTHER QUOTATIONS IN THIS PARAGRAPH: Croce, 52.
2 “GORGED WITH BOOTY”: Chron. C6, I, 165.
3 GIOVANNI DI MUSSI (footnote): Herlihy, Pistoia, 3, 266.
4 EFFORTS TO ENGAGE COUCY: Jean le Fèvre, 47–48; Valois, II, 443–45. NORWICH
CRUSADE, HIS CHARACTER: DNB. EXTORTIONS: Trevelyan, 268–69. SACRAMENTS
WITHHELD: Barnie, 24.
5 CALVELEY, “BY MY FAITH”: q. Barnie, 27.
6 BOURBOURG, “THEIR ANTIQUE NOBILITY”: Chron. C6, I, 281. COUCY’S IMPRESSIVE
SHOWING: KL, X, 254; also Johnes ed. of 1805–6, VI, 313. BISHOP OF ROCHESTER:
q. Barnie, 28.
7 NEGOTIATIONS WITH DUC DE BAR: Lacaille, thèse, 78.
8 COUCY, MASSES AT ST. MÉDARD: BN, Pièces originales 875, dossier Coucy.
9 COUCY VISITS BERNABÒ: Mesquita, 28.
10 GIAN GALEAZZO, CARRARA’S OPINION: q. Sismondi, V, 76.
11 HIS MOTHER’S WARNING: q. Chamberlin, 74.
12 A STATE PAPER BY SALUTATI: q. Schevill, Florence, 320. “WE MET WITH JOYFUL
EMBRACES”: Full texts of the Florentine correspondence concerning Coucy’s
campaign are printed in Durrieu, “Arezzo.” The report of the meeting with
Coucy and the complaint of his march are from the Signoria’s letter to the
King of France of 20 October 1384, which is also given in full (in Latin) in

KL, XI, 442–49. p. 409 ANJOU’S WILL: Valois, II, 76–83. DURAZZO’S SERVICES:
Chron. C6, 339, n. 3.
13 MESSAGES FROM ANJOU’S FOLLOWERS: Jean le Fèvre, 79.
14 CORRESPONDENCE ON THE PIETRAMALA: Coucy to Florence, 18 November 1384;
Signoria to Coucy, 24 November 1384, in Durrieu, “Arezzo,” 180–90.
15 GUILLAUME LE JUPPONNIER: Douet-d’Arcq, I, 59. “HA! FALSE TRAITOR”: q. Collas,
144–45.
16 COUCY IN AVIGNON: KL, X, 323; Lehoux, II, 109, n. 1. BONET: 63, 68, 81, 117–
19, 153, 160, 188.
Chapter 20—A Second Norman Conquest
For events and quotations concerning the invasion of England, the
Monk of St. Denis (Chron. C6, I) and Froissart (KL, XII) may be
generally taken for granted as the original sources, supplemented by
Mirot’s “Une tentative” Terrier de Loray’s life of Vienne, and
Roncière’s history of the French navy.
1 ISABEAU OF BAVARIA, WITTELSBACHS AND VISCONTIS, STEPHEN OF BAVARIA,
2 MARRIAGE NEGOTIATIONS ET SEQ.: Thibault, 12–42, in addition to the chroniclers.
3 GIAN GALEAZZO’S OUSTER OF BERNABÒ: Sismondi, V, 50; Mesquita, 15–36;
Chamberlin, 74–82; Cook, 19. ACTIVITY OF THE DUCHESSE D’ANJOU: Jean le Fèvre,
97; Lehoux, II, 125 .
4 CHARLES VI and DEER WITH THE GOLDEN COLLAR: Chron. C6, I, 71.
5 BURGUNDY DOUBLE WEDDING: in addition to the chroniclers, Vaughan, 88; CMH,
374.
6 COUCY ARRIVES IN “GREAT HASTE”: Anselme, 542.
7 . EXPEDITION TO SCOTLAND: Chron. C6, I, 351.
8 FRENCH BROUGHT 50 SUITS OF ARMOR: Book of Pluscarden, q. Locke, 84. See also P.
Hume Brown, History of Scotland, Cambridge, 1929, I, 191–92. The statement

in some of the earlier histories that Coucy was a member of this expedition
was based on a misreading of a reference in one ms. of Froissart to a Seigneur
de Courcy, corrected by Terrier de Loray, 204, n. 2. (The inconvenient Sire de
Courcy causes a further error with regard to Coucy’s second wife—see notes
to chap. 25, p. 650.)
9 COUCY’S REMARRIAGE: KL, X, 347; Duchesne, 267–68; Zurlauben, Enguerrand VII,
182.
10 RENOVATION OF THE CASTLE: Broche 340 .; Dufour, 50–54; Evans, Art, 166.
11 PERCEVAL, BASTARD OF COUCY: AN, Demay, Coll. Clairembault, Nos. 2841–42;
Duchesne, 273.
12 COUCY AT HAPSBURG-BURGUNDY WEDDING: Broche, 135. He is the archivist quoted.
13 ROYAL COUNCIL VOTED UNANIMOUSLY: Chron. C6, I, 420–31.
14 P “YOU ARE THE GREATEST KING LIVING”: Chron. Bourbon, q. Mirot, 429, n. 3.
FISHERMEN: ibid., 441.
15 P FRENCH INVASION FLEET: In addition to the sources listed above, material from
the Chronique de Tournai and other primary sources is quoted by Palmer,
England, France, 77–79.
16 BURGUNDY’S MOTTO: Terrier de Loray, 214. COUCY’S SHIP: Roncière, 89.
17 COUCY’S SEAL: AN, Demay. Coll. Clairembault, I, 2838. HIS RETINUE: KL, XXI, 45.
18 WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR: Cutts, 391. DESCHAMPS, NORMAN CONQUEST: q. Mirot, 455.
19 DUC DE BERRY: Luce, Cents ans, I, 212–27; Wylie, II, 405–32; Dupont & Gnudi,
150–51.
20 HOUNDS FROM SCOTLAND: Jusserand, 125, from Rymer for 3 April 1396.
21 FINED LANGUEDOC: Boudet, 64–65.
22 “SNUB-NOSES”: q. Wylie, II, 399, n. 5.
23 FLEET CAPTAINS’ LIST OF “ITEMS”: text from Chron. de Tournai, q. Vaughan, 50.
24 THIS “USELESS WAR”: Walsingham, q. Barnie, 129.
25 CHARLES vi VISITS COUCY: Broche, 341–43.

26 BAUDET LEFÈVRE: text of the pardon, which recounts the circumstances, in
Mangin (Bibliog. I, A), 42, n. 1.
27 COUCY’S VESSEL LOADED AT SOISSONS: Broche, 342.
28 . MONTFORT-clisson AFFAIR: Froissart, Berners ed., IV, 440–59; Lefranc, 279,
304–24; Moranvillé, Mercier, 112–13.
29 COUCY’S INSISTENCE ON RESTITUTION: KL, XIII, 84.
30 GUELDERS AFFAIR: Chron. C6, I, 523–25. VASSAL FOR MONEY: Perroy, Hundred
Years, 191; GUELDERS’ LETTER TO CHARLES VI: text in Douet-d’Arcq, I, 78.
31 COUCY ARGUES IN COUNCIL: KL. XIII, 84.
32 DEATH OF CHARLES OF NAVARRE: Chron. C6, I, 473, and Froissart.
33 COUCY’S MISSION TO MONTFORT: KL, XIII, 136, 337 .
34 KING’S GIFT OF A BIBLE: Lacaille, thèse, 117, from Delisle. FROISSART’S TRIBUTE:
Berners ed., V, 163.
Chapter 21—The Fiction Cracks
As before, events and quoted statements not otherwise identied
may be presumed to come from Chron. C6, I, or Froissart.
1 DESCHAMPS, “NOT ON THE GRAND PONT”: Queux ed., I, 156–57.
2 MÉZIÈRES QUOTED: Coopland ed., 524–25.
3 SOFT BEDS AND PERFUMED BATHS: preachers q. in Owst, 412. GERSON: q. Kilgour,
184.
4 SACCHETTI: q. Jacob Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, New
York, 1960 (paperback ed.), 262. 441 DESCHAMPS ILL ON CAMPAIGN: Raynaud in
Deschamps, Queux ed., XI, 296. An excellent analysis of Deschamps’ life,
work, and opinions may be found in this long essay by Queux’s editorial
successor. Ballads discussed here are in II, 214–26, 226–35. See also Kilgour,
64. p. 442 LOUIS D’ORLÉANS: Chron. C6; Jorga, 505; Collas, 143, 296.

5 CAMAL: Evans in notes to Díaz de Gómez, 153. VERSE: q. Mary Duchaux
(Darmesteter), A Short History of France, 1918, 86.
6 BURGUNDY VISITS COUCY: Petit, Itinéraires, 203; Prost, 475.
7 RICHARD DESCRIBED: Vita R. Ricardi II, ed. Hearne, 1729, q. Locke, 110.
HANDKERCHIEF: Hutchison, 239.
8 GRAND BOUTEILLER and PRIVILEGE OF TWO FAIRS: Duplessis, notes, 121; Duchesne,
268–69; Lacaille, “Vente,” 574–75; DBF, IX, 873. Text of the King’s grant in
Lépinois, 209–11. ON THE OFFICE OF GRAND BOUTEILLER: Lot & Fawtier, 54.
9 COMPLAINT OF 1388: q. Denie, 594.
10 MARKS OF DECLINE: Denie, 594; Jusserand, 43–44. The Benedictine abbey was
St. Nicolas-aux-Bois, diocese of Laon: Denie, 706.
11 DON PERO NIÑO AT SERIFONTAINE: Díaz de Gómez, 134–38. The host served as
Admiral of France from 1397 to 1405, which places the date of the visit
about 1405–6.
12 DESCHAMPS’ BALLAD ON RAUCOUS EVENING: Queux ed., VII, 253. ON BALDNESS:
Ballade 867. Obscurities in the language of this ballade were elucidated by
Prof. Howard Garey of Yale.
13 BROMYARD ON FOPPERY: q. Owst, 408.
14 DESCHAMPS’ AILMENTS, SINS HE CONDEMNED, COMPLAINT OF COURT LIFE: Raynaud in
Deschamps, Queux ed., XI, 296–97, 303–5.
15 COUCY SENDS MESSAGE TO PHILIPPA: Green, 227, from Rymer. NAMED CAPTAIN OF
GUIENNE: KL, XIV, 25.
16 MARCIAL LE VÉRIT: from text of pardon in Douet-d’Arcq. NOTTINGHAM’S
CHALLENGE: text in KL, notes, XIV, 398–99.
17 BOUCICAUT AT Roosebeke: KL, notes, X, 481.
18 COUCY PROPOSED FROISSART FOR CANONRY AT LILLE: Shears, 55–56. VERSE ON COUCY AS
PATRON: KL, la, 345. The meaning of rouge eseaille was suggested in
consultation by Profs. Howard Garey and Harry Miskimin of Yale.
19 COUCY OWNED OLDEST FROISSART MS.: KL, notes, lb, 224. This copy passed from
Coucy’s great-granddaughter Jeanne de Bar to the royal library when Louis XI

conscated the books of her husband, Louis of Luxemburg. Listed as ms. II 88
in the Royal Library of Brussels (and as #6941 in the Catalogue des Mss. by
Van den Gheyn), the copy has the Coucy coat-of-arms on fo. 16 r.
20 PETRARCH’S COMPLAINT: Correspondence, 28.
21 BOOKS GIVEN TO COUCY: Lacaille, thèse, 117, from Delisle, Cat. de la librairie du
Louvre, III, nos. 19, 1160.
22 VALENTINA VISCONTI: Chamberlin, 89–91, 109–12; Collas, 48 ORLÉANS
HOUSEHOLD: Lacroix, 74–75.
23 QUEEN’S ENTRY: Both Froissart and the Monk of St. Denis were eyewitnesses.
24 BURGUNDY’S CLOTHES: Vaughan, 43. ON THE “BED OF JUSTICE”: Bapst.
Chapter 22—The Siege of Barbary
1 TREASURY OFFICIALS, “HE HAS HAD TOO MUCH”: Chron. C6, I, 609.
2 CHARLES vi IN AVIGNON: Froissart; Chron. C6, I; Valois, II, 152–54.
3 Cent Ballades: Pannier, passim; Raynaud, xxxvi–xlix, li–v, lxiv–viii, 226–27.
4 BASTARD OF COUCY: La Chesnaye-Desbois.
5 KING’S TOUR OF LANGUEDOC and Bétizac AFFAIR: Chron. C6, I; Chron. Bourbon;
Froissart; Coville, 304–5.
6 GENOESE AMBASSADORS: Chron. C6, I, 653; Mirot, “Politique” 10.
7 FRESCO IN THE CLOISTER OF CARMES: Vaissète, IV, 396; Sabine Coron-Lesur,
unpublished dissertation on the Couvent des Grands Carmes de Toulouse, 140–
43, supplied through the kindness of Prof. Philippe Wol of Toulouse. A copy
of the fresco, generally known as “The Vow of Charles VI,” exists as an
engraving in the Musée Paul Dupuy in Toulouse, and is reproduced in
Vaissète, IV, plate XX-C, in G. Lafaille, Annales de la ville de Toulouse, 1687, I,
143, and in a number of later volumes. Lacking dierentiation of faces, it is
of little interest.

8 . SPANISH MISSION: That Coucy could have gone to Spain in the course of the
tour of Languedoc is unlikely but not impossible. The documents show him to
have been with the King at Toulouse for the founding of the Ordre de
l’Espérance on an unknown date in December, and again (or still) there on
January 5 when his signature was added to the King’s treaty with the Count
of Foix (Vaissète, ed. of 1885, IX, 938–51, X, notes, 125–29; Lacaille, thèse,
127–28). He reappeared at Avignon on January 28 to testify in the Processus
of Pierre de Luxemburg. This allows two intervals—one of unknown length in
December and one of 23 days in January—when he might have gone to
Barcelona and back, although the time element is very tight. No evidence
exists to support Froissart’s version of his role in the Anjou-Aragon marriage.
According to R. Oliver Bertrand, Bodas Reales entre Francia y la Corona de
Aragon, Barcelona, 1947, 203, a marriage contract was concluded and a
dispensation from Clement VII obtained in 1390, but the contract itself was
not found. Researches by Richard Famiglietti at the BN and AN and in the
published French and Spanish sources, and a search of the documents in the
Archivo de la Corona de Aragon at Barcelona (commissioned through the
kindness of Prof. J. N. Hillgarth) found no evidence of a journey by Coucy in
connection with the Anjou-Aragon marriage.
9 PIERRE DE LUXEMBURG: Baring-Gould, Lives of the Saints, VII, 85–88; Jorga, 460–
62; Valois, II, 300, 362–66; Huizinga, Waning, 179–80. Testimony in the
Processus for canonization occupies 133 double-column folio pages in Acta
Sanctorum, Paris, 1863–1940, vol. XXVIII, in which Coucy’s testimony
appears on pp. 464–65, 468, 472, 476, 488.
10 THE ROYAL VISIT TO DIJON: Petit, Entrée, passim; KL, la, 556.
11 “FOR THE SOUL’S SALVATION”: q. Cartellieri, 29.
12 COUCY’S FOUNDATION OF CÉLESTIN MONASTERY: Roussel, 19–24.
13 FOIX’S “BOOK OF PRAYERS”: Pierre Tucoo-Chala, Gaston Febus, Pau, 1976, 103.
14 P COUCY’S CHARTER: BN, Fonds Latins, 5149, published in Roussel, 193–96, and
(in part) in Duplessis, 158–59.
15 . THE ENTERPRISE AGAINST BARBARY: Chron. Bourbon, 218–57, is the chief
primary source, taking precedence in this episode over Froissart (KL, XIV)

and Chron. C6, I, 650–57 et seq. Secondary accounts: Delaville le Roux, 166–
200; Mirot, “Politique”; Atiya, Crusade in Later Middle Ages.
16 BONET ON WAR AGAINST UNBELIEVERS: 126–27.
17 STRATEGY OF ABOU-’L-ABBAS: Ibn-Khaldoun, 118–19.
18 COUCY DISAPPROVES THE CHALLENGE: Chron. Bourbon, 233.
19 CHARLES VI VISITS COUCY: Jarry, “Voie de Fait,” 224.
Chapter 23—In a Dark Wood
1 “WE CAN ENVISION NOTHING FINER”: KL, XIV, 280–81. On the Voie de Fait in
general, Froissart and Chron. C6, I, continue to be the narrative sources.
Valois, II, and Mirot, “Politique,” are modern accounts.
2 JEAN GERSON: Morrall, passim. ON JOAN OF ARC: CMH, 810.
3 PETRARCH ON THE SCHOLASTICS: Correspondence, 222–23.
4 . GERSON’S OPINIONS: Copleston, 278; Thorndike, IV, 108, 114, 128. ON
CURRICULUM FOR SCHOOLS: Gabriel, ON CHILDREN’S SEXUAL HABITS: Ariès, 106–7.
5 CONTROVERSY OVER Roman de la Rose: Bédier & Lazard, 98–99.
6 GERSON, “INTO THE FIRE”; KL, la, 221, n. 1.
7 JEAN DE MONTREUIL AND PIERRE COL: Huizinga, Waning, 113–15, 308–9.
8 BONIFACE, SALE OF BENEFICES: Creighton, I 16–17. CLEMENT PAWNS TIARA: Coville,
314–15.
9 WENCESLAS IV: Lindner, II, 170–77; Kamil Krofta, “Bohemia in the 14th
Century,” chap. 6 in CMH; Jules Zeller, Les Empereurs du XIVe siècle, Paris,
1890, 450–52.
10 DRUNKENNESS IN GERMANY: Lindner, II, 174. POGROM OF PRAGUE: Baron, IX, 160
., 202, 318.
11 CONTROVERSY OVER THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION: Michelet, ed. of 1840, IV, 57;
Creighton, 112.

12 BERNARDINO OF SIENA: q. G. G. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty, London, 1938,
45. WALSINGHAM ON UNBELIEF: q. Jusserand, 224.
13 CLAMANGES AND GERSON ON IRREVERENCE: q. M. Mollat, Vie, 65.
14 BRETHREN OF THE COMMON LIFE: Hyma, passim; Southern, 331–52.
15 GROOTE AND THOMAS A KEMPIS: ibid.
16 Imitation of Christ ASCRIBED TO GERSON: Coville, 416–17. GERSON’S SERMON:
Valois, II, 395.
17 CLEMENT PREPARES FOR ROME: Coville, 302.
18 THOMAS OF GLOUCESTER: KL, XIV, 314–15, 384; XV, 165, 240.
19 GUY DE BLOIS: KL, XIV, 370; Barante, II, 36–38.
20 COUCY’S ROLE: Jarry, Orléans, 85; Lacaille, thèse, 138; KL, XVI, 71.
21 PRECAUTIONS TAKEN AT AMIENS: KL, XIV.
22 COUCY AND PHILIPPA: ibid., 378. BURGUNDY’S CLOTHES: Barante, II, 39.
Chapter 24—Danse Macabre
1 . THE CRAON-CLISSON AFFAIR: Chron. C6, II, 3 ., and KL, XIV, 316–20, are the
basic narrative sources. They are combined in a lively account by Barante, II,
46–55. Modern accounts in Coville, 305; CMH, 372; Lefranc, 340–56.
Admiral de Vienne’s conduct: Lefranc, 356. On Craon personally, see DBF and
Bio. Index in KL.
2 CRAON’S ASSASSINATION OF A KNIGHT OF LAON: KL, notes, XV, 362. 495 SECRET
CORRESPONDENCE OF THE UNCLES WITH DUKE OF BRITTANY: Sismondi, Histoire des
Français, Paris, 1828, II, 597.
3 . CAMPAIGN AGAINST BRITTANY and THE KING’S MADNESS AT LE MANS: Chron.
4C6, II, 19–25; KL, XV, 40–49; Barante, II, 59–81; Moranvillé, 89, 124–26, 149.
5 GUILLAUME DE HARSIGNY: Edouard Fleury, Antiquités et monuments du département
de l’Aisne, Paris, 1882, 242–43. Also Mâle.

6 COUCY IN RIVIERE’S ARREST: KL, XV, 63–64, and notes, 365; Lefranc, 367. RECEIVES
MERCIER’S PROPERTY: KL, XV, 67; Moranvillé, 158, 161, 163.
7 BURGUNDY AND CLISSON: Lefranc, 365–67. COUCY REFUSES CONSTABLESHIP: KL, XV, 97.
8 COUCY ESCORTS KING TO LIESSE: Lacaille, thèse, 142; DBF, IX, 873. HARSIGNY’S EFFIGY:
now in the museum at Laon. The inscription reads “Deo et Nature reddo
Simplicia. Acta compositi sint Deo Grata.” Allowing for ambiguities of language,
the translation could be: “I give back to God and nature my [bodily]
elements. May the deeds of the whole [man] be pleasing to God.”
9 LADIES HAD TO TURN SIDEWAYS TO PASS THROUGH DOORWAYS: described by Juvenal des
Ursins, q. Collas, 75.
10 COUCY IN SAVOY: Duchesne, 269–70.
11 CUSTOMS AT SECOND MARRIAGES: M. Mollat, Vie, 57.
12 . DANCE OF THE SAVAGES: Chron. C6, II, 65–71; KL, XV, 77, 85–87, 89–90, 92;
Chron. Valois, 328; Barante, II, 95–99. Huguet de Guisay’s character is from
Chron. C6.
13 LOUIS’ CÉLESTIN CHAPEL: Chron. C6, II, 75; Jorga, 506.
14 . Danse Macabre: Carco; Chaney; Huizinga, Waning, 139–41. On origin of
the phrase, in addition to the above, OCFL. CHURCH OF THE INNOCENTS MURALS:
Chaney, from verses and woodcuts in Guyot Marchant’s Danse Macabre, c.
1485. EFFIGY OF CARDINAL DE LA GRANGE: now in Musée Calvet, Avignon;
illustrated in Joseph Girard, Avignon: ses monuments, Marseille, 1930. A
thorough if pedestrian listing of such egies with illustrations appears in
Kathleen Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol: The Transi Tomb in the Late
Middle Ages and Renaissance, Berkeley, 1974.
15 CEMETERY OF THE INNOCENTS: Mâle, 360; Huizinga, Waning, 144; Carco, 29.
16 SEVEN SORROWS OF THE VIRGIN: Mâle, 125. BEAUTIFUL MADONNAS: One of the most
characteristic and charming is the statue of the Madonna of the Bird at the
church of Notre Dame du Mathuret in Riom in Auvergne. POPULATION REDUCED
BY 50 PERCENT: Russell, “Eects of Pestilence,” 470; Carpentier, AESC, 1082–
83.

17 . PESSIMISM: Gower, from Confessio Amantis. DATINI: q. Origo, 116. GERSON: q.
Thorndike, History, IV, 115. MONK OF CLUNY: q. Coulton, Life, I, 2. MÉZIÈRES: q.
Coopland ed., I, 255. ROGER BACON: q. Coulton, Life, II, 57. DESCHAMPS: q. KL, la.
440–41. CHRISTINE DE PISAN: q. ibid.; SAFE-CONDUCTS: from her Book of Fayttes,
xix. UNIVERSITY SELLING DEGREES: Coville, 395.
18 “VICES OF THE DIFFERENT ORDERS”: q. T. Wright, Political Songs, I, lxxxiv–vi.
19 NOTARY OF CAHORS: Denie, 827.
20 GOWER ON WAR: q. Barnie, 123, 131. “NO PEACE TILL THEY GIVE BACK CALAIS”: q.
Locke, 95.
21 PARLEY AT LEULINGHEN: Chron. C6, II, 77–83; Froissart (who was present),
Berners ed., VI, 110–21.
22 THOMAS OF GLOUCESTER: ibid.
23 CHARLES vi’s PERIODS OF MADNESS: Chron. C6, II, 87–91, 405, 455; Barante, II,
110–11, 223–24; Collas, 260; Thibault, 222–24.
24 WILLIAM OF HAINAULT: Darimesteter, 38. ON MENTAL ILLNESS: E. Wright, 356.
25 ISABEAU’S CONDUCT: Collas, 297; Thibault, 265, 281, 290, 316. “THIS RIDICULOUS
TRIBUNAL”: Juvenal des Ursins, q. Mazas, IV, 181. Founded in 1400 with the
intention of honoring women and cultivating poetry, the Cour Amoureuse
included one member who was convicted of attempted rape in 1405, and
another who kidnapped a dame d’honneur (whom he later married after
repudiating his wife). Among other members of all classes were the vocal
advocates of the Roman de la Rose, Jean de Montreuil, and Pierre and Gontier
Col. (A. Piaget, “Cour Amoureuse,” Romania, XX, 447.)
26 MARQUIS DE SADE: see Bibliography. Written in 1813, this was his last book,
not published until 1953. Sade claimed to have found at Dijon the transcript
of the trial of Louis de Bourdon, the Queen’s lover, who revealed under
torture her part in the crimes of the reign. Unhampered by the disappearance
of the transcript in the destruction of the library by the “Huns of the French
Revolution,” the Marquis was able, 40 years after reading it, to write the
biography ascribing to Isabeau responsibility for every “drop of blood spilled
in this terrible reign.” In his version, she prostituted herself to Craon to
contrive the attack on Clisson, gave Charles the poisons that caused his

madness, arranged for the appearance of the madman in the forest of Mans,
planned the fatality of the Dance of the Savages, acted as accomplice in the
murder of her former lover Louis d’Orléans, coupled in the slums with thieves
and murderers, poisoned three of her own children, and delivered Joan of Arc
to the Inquisition. Sade was a one-cause historian.
27 DUG DE SULLY: q. François Guizot, Hist, of France, trans., New York, 1885, III,
9.
Chapter 25—Lost Opportunity
For the eorts to end the schism, the death of Clement, the election
of Benedict, and his refusal to abdicate, the chief primary source is
the Monk of St. Denis (Chron. C6, II, 131–317), who was obviously
more interested in, and closer to the struggle than Froissart (KL,
XIV–XV). Both are supplemented by Valois, II–III; Jarry, “Voie de
Fait,” 523–41; Creighton. Where not otherwise stated, the above are
the sources for the events in this chapter that relate to the schism.
1 SPINELLI’S ARGUMENT: q. Chamberlin, 153.
2 COUCY’S MISSION TO AVIGNON: KL, XIV, notes, 422–26; Durrieu, “Adria,” 13–64;
Jarry, Orléans, 117; Mirot, “Politique,” 527; Lehoux, II, 296.
3 NOBLES FEARED COMMONERS’ ARCHERY: Chron. C6, II, 131. Also Jean Juvenal des
Ursins, q. Fowler, Plantagenet and Valois, 177.
4 GERSON’S ORAL DEFENSE: Morrall, 34–36.
5 COUCY AGAIN IN AVIGNON: same sources as above: KL, ibid.; Durrieu, 72–75;
Jarry, Orléans, 121; Jarry, “Voie de Fait,” 517; Mirot, “Politique,” 530–31.
6 NICOLAS DE CLAMANGES: Ornato, 16; DBF and Michaud, Biographie universelle.
Text of his address in Chron. C6, II, 135 .
7 TRANSLATED FOR THE COUNCIL: Jarry, “Voie de Fait,” 523.
8 “AS THOUGH THE HOLY GHOST”: q. Creighton, 129. 400 MILES IN FOUR DAYS: Hay,
363.

9 . COUCY’S CAMPAIGN FOR GENOA: The major sources are Jarry’s Orléans, 134–56,
and Delisle’s summaries of the documents in the Coll. Bastard d’Estang at the
BN, Fonds fr., nouv. acq. 3638–9 and 3653–4–5. These contain some three
dozen documents covering transactions by Coucy. Payments to him from the
crown are in BN, Pièces originales, 875, dossier Coucy. Lacaille, thèse, 156–94,
adds references from Italian sources. Froissart is the source for Coucy holding
conferences with the Genoese outdoors (KL, XV, 221–22). Modern authorities:
Jarry, “Voie de Fait,” 532–37; Mesquita, 157–58; Mirot, “Politique,” 533–35.
10 VISIT TO PAVÍA: BN, Coll. Bastard d’Estang, 231, 234.
11 GIOVANNI DEI GRASSI: Meiss & Kirsch.
12 BUILDING OF THE CATHEDRAL: Chamberlin, 122–26, 173–75.
13 COUCY’S “WOUNDED LEG”; Jarry, Orléans, 161.
14 CLAMANGES GOES OVER TO BENEDICT: Valois, III, 270, n. 4; Creighton, 433–34.
Further on this episode: Ornato, 27, 33–41.
15 BENEDICT DIED AT 94: CMH, 301.
16 “TO AID AND SUSTAIN” RICHARD II: q. McKisack, 476, from Rymer, VII, 811.
LOLLARD TWELVE “CONCLUSIONS”: Gairdner, I, 43–44.
17 THREATENED TO KILL SIR RICHARD STURY: Hutchison, 155.
18 COUCY REFUSED “BECAUSE HE WAS A FRENCHMAN”: Froissart, Berners ed., VI, 130.
19 GLOUCESTER, ROBERT THE HERMIT, WALERAN DE ST. POL: ibid., VI, 161–68, 211–12.
20 MARRIAGE OF ISABEL AND RICHARD: Froissart, Berners ed., 224–29. Froissart’s
statement that the only French lady to accompany Isabel to England was the
Dame de Courcy (KL, XV, 306) became Coucy in Lord Berners’ translation
(VI, 229) and accounts for Mrs. Green’s error (228) in identifying this lady,
who was later to bring back the news of Richard’s deposition, as Coucy’s
second wife.
Chapter 26—Nicopolis

Apart from Schiltberger’s sparse account told 30 years after the
event (see p. 554), the primary Western sources for the crusade to
Nicopolis are the Livre des faits du bon messire Jean le Maingre, dit
Bouciquaut (Godefroy ed., pp. 78–104), written at about the time of
the subject’s death in 1421 (by an “anonymous cleric” according to
OCFL, although Kervyn Lettenhove—XX, 372—believed the author
was Christine de Pisan); the Monk of St. Denis (Chron. C6, II, 485–
519); and Froissart, KL, XV, 218–328, passim. These are the bases
for the spirited accounts by Abbé Vertot in the 18th century and
Barante in the early 19th. KL’s notes add material from Dom
Plancher’s Histoire Générale de Bourgogne, Dijon, 1739–81. The most
thorough modern account and a classic work is Delaville le Roux, La
France en Orient, Book III, chaps. 1–5, whose wealth of notes lls in
a mass of information. Where not otherwise cited, the events in this
chapter are drawn from the above sources.
Atiya’s Nicopolis, usually cited (by English-speaking historians) as
the standard work, supposedly draws on an impressive bibliography
of Turkish sources, but little evidence of this appears in the text.
With minor exceptions, not all of them accurate, this book is not
much more than a reworking of Delaville. Rosetti supplies a useful
survey from all sources of estimated numbers engaged in the
crusade. Savage points up the importance of Coucy’s oensive.
Tipton contributes an original and valuable investigation of the
supposed English role.
1 HALF THE TURKISH ARMY HELD LAND IN EUROPE: Oman, 344.
2 A ghazi, “THE SWORD OF GOD”: q. Anthony Luttrell, “The Crusade in the 14th
century” in Hale, Higheld & Smalley, 139.
3 A FORD OF THE DANUBE AT NICOPOLIS: Kousev, 70. This does not seem to jibe with
accounts of fugitives of the battle drowning in attempts to swim across.
4 BAJAZET ANSWERED WITHOUT WORDS: Hammer, 323.
5 SIGISMUND, “YOU BOHEMIAN PIG!”: Otto Zarek, The History of Hungary, trans.,
London, 1939, 182.
6 BONE OF ST. ELIZABETH: q. Wylie, II, 432, n. 4.

7 AT PARLEMENT OF PARIS: Douet-d’Arcq, I, 382. 544 MÉZIÈRES’ ORDER OF THE PASSION:
Kilgour, 148–62. 546 JEAN DE NEVERS, APPEARANCE: Michelet, IV, 45; Calmette,
57–58.
8 EQURPMENT: David, 37, from Plancher, Bourgogne, III, 149.
9 SUPPOSED ENGLISH PARTICIPATION: The evidence refuting it has been eectively
presented by Tipton, leading to his conclusion, “No Englishman whatsoever
can be identied as positively among the crusading army,” 533. p. 550 “THEY
GO LIKE KINGS”: q. Jorga, 489.
10 SLANDER OF VALENTINA: chronicles, and Mesquita, 203; Chamberlin, 176.
11 GIAN GALEAZZO SUPPOSEDLY INFORMED BAJAZET: KL, XV, 253, 262, 329, 338.
12 ESTIMATE OF NUMBERS: Lot, 456; Rosetti, 633–35.
13 “HOW SEDUCTIVE is WAR!”: Jean de Beuil, Le Jouvencel, 2 vols. SHF, Paris, 1887,
II, 20–21.
14 COUCY’S ATTACK: Wavrin, 149; KL, XV, 314; Savage, 437–40.
15 COUCY SEEN “UNSHAKEN”: Livre des faits, Godefroy ed., 97. SIGISMUND, “WE LOST THE
DAY”: Schiltberger, ed. notes, 109.
16 BAJAZET SWEARS REVENGE: Schiltberger, 4.
Chapter 27—Hung Be the Heavens with Black
Livre des faits … de Boucicaut (Godefroy ed., 104–14), Froissart, and
Chron. C6, II, continue to be the main primary sources. It may be
assumed that these and Delaville le Roux, chaps. 6–9, are the
sources for material not otherwise cited.
1 MARCH OF THE PRISONERS: from the account of Georey Maupoivre in Delaville,
“Le Legs d’Enguerrand VII” (Bibliog. I, B).
2 COUCY’S MIRACLE: ibid.
3 “FORTUNATE TO BE IN A WORLD”: KL, XV, 334.
4 DESCHAMPS ON FUNERALS: Queux ed., VIII, 85–86.

5 DAME DE COUCY WRITES TO DOGE: XV, 426. ORLÉANS’ MESSENGERS:
6 Mangin, 45–46, 52–54; BN, Fonds fr., nouv. acq. 3638–9, nos. 268–9, 308,
456.
7 ManginGIFTS FOR BAJAZET: Barante, II, 201; Jarry, Orléans, 185–86.
8 DESCHAMPS, “MONEY!”: q. Gustave Masson, Story of Medieval France, 1888.
9 L’ALOUËTE: 182.
10 ANONYMOUS POEM ON TWELVE AGES: q. Mâle, 303–4.
11 NICHOLAS OF AENOS: Livre des faits, q. Atiya, Nicopolis, 105.
12 COUCY’S WILL: published in Testaments enregistrés au parlement de Paris sous le
règne de Charles VI, ed. A. Tuetey, in Documents inédits, Mélanges historiques,
nouv. série, Paris, Imp. nat., 1858, III, 39–44.
13 COUCY’S DEATH: The assumption made by some historians that he died alone,
the Sultan having moved on, taking the prisoners with him and leaving Coucy
behind because he was too ill to travel, cannot be reconciled with the eight
signatures to his will. The Sultan and French prisoners did indeed move on to
Mikalidsch, two days’ journey from Brusa, where Burgundy’s envoy
Guillaume de l’Aigle met them, supposedly in January. Either that date is an
error or the prisoners must have returned to Brusa—perhaps because of
Coucy’s imminent death—in time to sign the will.
14 “REFINED AND BARBARIC”: Lefranc, Intro., x.
15 “SEIGNEUR OF MOST MERIT”: Livre des faits, Godefroy, 2nd ed., The Hague, 1711,
81.
16 RETURN OF COUCY’S REMAINS: Duplessis, 103. DAME DE COUCY: Godefroy, 1620,
106. FUNERAL: KL, XV, 357, 437; XVI, 31. TOMB: destroyed (presumably) in the
destruction of Nogent-sous-Coucy; the plaque from Ste. Trinité is now in the
museum of Soissons. DESCHAMPS’ DIRGE: Queux ed., Ballad 1366.
17 . RANSOM AND RETURN OF THE PRISONERS: In addition to the sources at the head
of the chapter, Vaughan, 71–77. BURGUNDY’S GIFTS MISFIRED: Bavyn ms.,
Mémoires du voiage fait en Hongrie par Jean dit Sans-Peur, Comte de Nevers, q.
Atiya, Nicopolis, 103. BURGUNDY’S BOOKS BOUGHT FROM DINO RAPONDI: Durrieu,
Mss. de luxe, 163, and Putnam, 275.

18 TOURNAI EXPECTED A PARDON: Delaville, 320, n. 2.
19 Epistre Lamentable: Jorga, 500–503; also reprinted as anonymous in KL, XVI,
444–523. BONET’S SATIRE: q. Kilgour, 158–60, 172–73.
20Quatre Valois: Chron. 4 Valois, 187, 192.
21 BAJAZET IN WAGON WITH BARS: On this famously disputed question, Gibbon (VI,
370–84) cites French, Italian, Turkish, and Greek sources to refute the claim
of Persian historians that the story is a fable reecting “vulgar credulity.”
Gibbon’s editors (Milman, Guizot, Wenck, and Smith) accept the explanation
of Von Hammer that the so-called iron cage was a mistranslation of the
Turkish word hafe meaning a covered litter, in this case covered by a
latticework made of iron. See also F. Schevill, History of the Balkan Peninsula,
New York, 1922, 190. COUCY’S “MANY FINE PONDS”: as described in the suit
brought by Robert de Bar, q. Lacaille, “Vente,” 594. FAMILY LITIGATION: ibid.
22 PROPOSED MARRIAGE TO STEPHEN OF BAVARIA: originating in Chron. C6, II, 765,
the erroneous statement that the marriage was concluded was repeated by
Duchesne and Duplessis and others down the line until corrected by Thibault,
355. SALE OF THE PROPERTY TO ORLÉANS: Lacaille, “Vente,” 574–87; Jarry, Orléans,
239–42, 311.
Epilogue
1 ORLÉANIST MANIFESTO, SUNK IN CRIME AND SIN: q. Enid McLeod, Charles d’Orléans,
New York, 1970, 63.
2 AGINCOURT: Wylie, II, 108–230. An eyewitness account of the battle from the
Chronicle of Jehan de Wavrin is quoted in Allmand, 107–11.
3 HEAVY ARMOR AND HEART FAILURE: Oman, 377.
4 “FORESTS CAME BACK WITH THE ENGLISH”: q. Evans, Life, 141. DESOLATION OF PICARDY
AND STARVING WOMAN OF ABBEVILLE: Lestocquoy, 47–48. COUCY DELIVERED TO THE
ENEMY: Antoine d’Asti, q. Dufour, 51. REALISTIC HORRORS ON STAGE: Cohen, 149,
267.
5 CONGEALING OF CHARITY: Mâle, 440.

6 HUSSITE “MOVING FORT”: Oman.
7 POPULATION, ROUEN: Cheyney, 166. SCHLESWIG: Heers, 106.
8 THOMAS BASIN: Histoire de Charles VII, ed. Charles Samaran, Paris, 1933, I, 87, q.
Fowler, Plantagenet and Valois, 150–51.
9 CASTILLON: ibid., q. Allmand, 11–13.
10 TURKS’ SIEGE TRAIN: Oman, 357–58. VICTOR HUGO: q. Mâle, 295.
11 COUCY LINEAGE: La Chesnaye-Desbois; Anselme, V, 243, VII, 566; L’Art de
vérier, 243; Melleville, 20. PERCEVAL HAD NO HEIRS: Duplessis, 107.
12 FATE OF THE CASTLE AND MONASTERY: Duchesne, 672; L’Art de vérier, 219;
Dufour, 21, n. 1; Viollet-le-Duc, Coucy, 30–31; Roussel, 42.
13 RUPPRECHT OF BAVARIA: His intervention was related by him to Friedrich P.
Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, trans., New York, 1970, 196.
LUDENDORFF’S 28 TONS OF DYNAMITE: Histoire de Coucy, pamphlet of
Ass’n … Coucy-le-Château, by R. Leray, J. Vian, and H. Crepin.

About the Author
BARBARA W. TUCHMAN achieved prominence as a historian with The
Zimmermann Telegram and international fame with The Guns of
August, a huge best-seller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. There
followed ve more books: The Proud Tower, Stilwell and the American
Experience in China (also awarded the Pulitzer Prize), A Distant
Mirror, Practicing History, a collection of essays, and, most recently,
The March of Folly. The First Salute was Mrs. Tuchman’s last book
before her death in February 1989.