Such was the France to which Coucy returned in 1367. His own domain, judging by a major step he took in the following year, suffered from the shortage of labor that was afflicting landowners everywhere since the Black Death. Picardy, in the path of English penetration from the start, had suffered 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 specific 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’ superfluity 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, offering 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 profit him to destroy and render null the said custom, taking the profit offered 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 offered “more profitable 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 profits, 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 fief and barony which we hold of the King,” who will be asked to approve and confirm the deed. Royal confirmation was duly received three months later.
Landowners in general, especially the less prosperous with holdings too small to allow a margin of revenue, had suffered 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 suffer 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 figures 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 unaffected places filled with beauty and games, music and dancing, love and work. While clouds of smoke by day and the glow of flames 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 effect 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 flag flew, 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 different 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 satisfied 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 fly. 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 fingernails. 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 ineffably 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 stuffed 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 different 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 fine 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. Buffoons and devils curl and twist through flowering vines, rabbits fight with soldiers, trained dogs show their tricks, sacred texts trail off into long-tailed fantastical creatures, bare-bottomed monks climb towers, tonsured heads appear on dragons’ bodies. Goat-footed priests, monkeys, minstrels, flowers, 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 sacrifice 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 off 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 offerings’ 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 first 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 fixed 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 flask of Virgin’s milk, Christ’s swaddling clothes, and bits and pieces of various instruments of the crucifixion 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 crucifixes.
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 afflicted him during his regency, but still suffered from a malady—perhaps gout—of the right hand or arm and a mysterious fistula 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 fifteen days in which he would have time to settle his affairs 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 effect, 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 scientific 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 scientific 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 magnificence 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 finest 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 florins 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, fish, 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 fish and thirty different 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” florins, 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 figure, supposedly a Saracen. Two Visconti ruled jointly in Lombardy—Galeazzo and his more terrible brother, Bernabò. Murder, cruelty, avarice, effective 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 fiefs 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, flaying, gouging of eyes, cutting off 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 testified 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 first palace of the universe,” and by a later admirer “the finest dwelling place in Europe,” it was built of rose-red brick baked from Lombard clay, and boasted 100 windows surrounding a magnificent 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 flowers,” and he suffered grievously from gout—“the malady of the rich,” as it was called by the Count of Flanders, who suffered 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 florins a month for five 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 coffers.” Thirty double courses of meat and fish 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 fierce strong daunts or war-dogs, sometimes used with cauldrons of flaming pitch strapped to their backs, and twelve splendid fat oxen.
The meats and fish, 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 fish 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 influential alliance that Galeazzo had bought at such enormous expense, the cause was more likely the delayed effect 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 first 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 significance and no less splendor. Charles V had outmaneuvered the King of England to win for his brother Philip of Burgundy the same heiress that King Edward wanted for his son Edmund. She was Marguerite of Flanders, daughter and heir of Louis de Male, Count of Flanders, he who had once run away from union with Isabella. Edward had been negotiating for this lady of large expectations for five years, even to the point of pledging Calais and 170,000 livres to her father. But since the principals were related within the fourth degree of consanguinity, as hardly any two royal persons in Europe were not, a papal dispensation was needed. Determined to keep England and Flanders apart, Charles exploited the utility of a French Pope. Urban V refused the dispensation to Edmund and Marguerite and, after a decent interval, granted it to Philip and Marguerite, who were related in the same degree. The uniting of Burgundy and Flanders, so great a coup for France, carried the seed of a monstrous birth, for it created a state that was to contend with the parent and in the next century give England revenge in the darkest stage of the war.
To please Marguerite’s passion for jewels, the Duke of Burgundy sent throughout Europe for diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, and bought, as the prize of the collection, a pearl necklace from Enguerrand de Coucy for 11,000 livres.
Three enormous coffers of precious objects preceded Philip’s arrival in Ghent for the wedding. Through gifts and feasts to both nobles and burghers, processions and tournaments, escorting and meeting guests at the frontiers, and liveries made especially for the occasion, the Duke made every effort to win over and impress the Flemish. Ostentation for Philip was political, part of the process of building a state by prestige. He himself was always gorgeously dressed, affecting a hat with plumes of ostrich, pheasant, and “bird of India,” and another of gold ribbons and damask imported from Italy. A man of strenuous temperament, he spent days at a time hunting, often sleeping outdoors in the forest, played energetic tennis, and was the most restless traveler of the day, moving from place to place as often as one hundred times a year. Many of his journeys were pilgrimages, with a portable reliquary and rosary carried wherever he went. He attended mass almost as assiduously as the King, meditated alone like the King in a private oratory, and did not fail to make his religious offerings conspicuous. After his marriage, he presented the Virgin’s statue in the Cathedral of Tournai with a robe and mantle of cloth of gold lined with miniver and brilliantly embroidered with his and his wife’s coats-of-arms.
Riding into Ghent resplendent in color and bells and richly draped horses, the nobility gathered for the wedding. “Especially,” reports Froissart, “the good Sire de Coucy was there, who made the finest showing at a festivity and knew better than any other how to conduct himself, and for that the King sent him.” Bit by bit the picture builds of a striking figure, one who stood out in manners and appearance among his peers.
The amount the rich could squander on occasions like these in a period of repeated disasters appears inexplicable, not so much with regard to motive as with regard to means. Where, in the midst of ruin and decline and lowered revenues from depopulated estates and towns, did all the money come from to endow the luxury? For one thing, money in coin was not vulnerable to plague like human life; it did not disappear, and if stolen by brigands it re-entered circulation. In a reduced population the amount of hard cash available was proportionately greater. Probably too, in spite of the plague’s heavy mortality, the capacity to produce goods and services was not reduced, because so much of the population at the beginning of the century had been surplus. In proportion to the surviving rich, goods and services may have actually increased.
Ostentation and pageantry to raise the ruler’s image above his peers and excite the admiration and awe of the populace was traditionally the habit of princes. But now in the second half of the 14th century it went to extremes, as if to defy the increased uncertainty of life. Conspicuous consumption became a frenzied excess, a gilded shroud over the Black Death and lost battles, a desperate desire to show oneself fortunate in a time of advancing misfortune.
The sense of living in a time of affliction was expressing itself in art in a greater emphasis on human drama and human emotion. The Virgin becomes more anguished in sorrow for her dead son; in the Narbonne Altarpiece painted at this time, she is pictured swooning in the arms of her supporters. In another version by the Rohan Master, all humanity’s bewildered suffering is concentrated in the face of John the Apostle, who, as he supports the swooning mother at the foot of the cross, turns grief-stricken eyes to God as if to ask, “How could you let this happen?”
Boccaccio felt the shadows closing in and turned from the good-humored, life-loving Decameron to a sour satire on women called Il Corbaccio (The Crow). Once the delight of his earlier tales, woman now appears as a greedy harpy, concerned only with clothes and lovers, ready to consort in her lechery with servant or black Ethiopian. Following The Crow, he chose another dispiriting theme on the fall from fortune of great figures in history who through pride and folly were reduced from happiness and splendor to misery.
“Such are the times, my friend, on which we are fallen,” agreed Petrarch in a letter to Boccaccio of 1366. The earth, he wrote, “is perhaps depopulated of true men but was never more densely populated with vice and the creatures of vice.”
Pessimism was a normal tone of the Middle Ages, because man was understood to be born doomed and requiring salvation, but it became more pervasive, and speculation about the coming of Anti-Christ more intense, in the second half of the century. Speculatores or scouts existed, it was believed, who watched for signs that would tell of the coming of “last things.” The end was awaited both in dread and in hope, for Anti-Christ would finally be defeated at Armageddon, ushering in the reign of Christ and a new age.
* 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, saffron, and flour sometimes mixed with real gold leaf.