As events moved toward the re-opening of war between France and England, Enguerrand was caught by his English marriage on the prongs of a forked allegiance. He could neither take up arms against his father-in-law, to whom he owed fealty for his English lands, nor, on the other hand, fight against his natural liege lord, the King of France.
King Charles was pressing hard on the issue of sovereignty raised by the Gascon lords. Taking pains to prepare an elaborate justification for resuming hostilities, the King asked for legal opinions from eminent jurists of the universities of Bologna, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orléans, who not surprisingly returned favorable replies. Draped in the law, Charles summoned the Black Prince to Paris to answer the complaints against him. “Fiercely beholding” the messengers, the Prince fittingly replied that he would gladly come, “but I assure you that it will be with helmet on our head and 60,000 men in our company.” Thereupon Charles promptly proclaimed him a disloyal vassal, pronounced the Treaty of Brétigny void, and declared war as of May 1369.
As this situation developed, lords who held lands of both kings “were sore troubled in their myndes … and specially the lorde of Coucy, for it touched him gretly.” In the awkward predicament of owing allegiance to two lords at war with each other, a vassal, according to Bonet, should render his military service to the lord of his first oath and send a substitute to fight for the other—an ingenious but expensive solution. Coucy could not be compelled by King Edward to fight against his natural liege, but it was clear enough that if he fought for France, his great holdings as Earl of Bedford, and possibly Isabella’s too, would be confiscated.
His first plan was to leave in pursuit of a Hapsburg inheritance from his mother which lay across the Jura on the Swiss side of Alsace and had been withheld from him by his cousins Albert III and Leopold III, Dukes of Austria. Although Coucy’s claim has been disputed and the circumstances are confused, he himself clearly had no doubts of his right. His seal of 1369 bears a shield quartered with the arms of Austria in the same fashion that Edward quartered his arms with those of France to represent his claim to the French crown. Faceless and barely two inches high, the tiny figure on the seal expressed by its unusual stance the same haughtiness as the Coucy motto. Unlike the typical noble’s seal of a galloping knight with upraised sword, the Coucy figure stands erect, in mail with closed visor, austere and stern, holding in its right hand a lance planted on the ground and in its left the shield. Such a standing figure, rarely used, implied regency or royal descent, and appeared in Coucy’s time on the arms of the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Bourbon. In one form or another, sometimes with a crest of plumes descending upon the shoulders, the upright immobile figure remained on Coucy’s seals throughout his lifetime.
With a small body of knights and mixed Picard-Breton-Norman men-at-arms, Coucy entered Alsace in imperial territory in September 1369. At about this time Isabella returned to England with her daughters, either to protect her revenues or because her mother was dying at Windsor, or both. The death of good Queen Philippa in August 1369 had historic effect in that it turned Froissart back to France and French patrons—of whom Coucy was to be one—and to a French point of view in the unfolding chronicle.
In Alsace, Coucy had contracted with the Count of Montbéliard, at a price of 21,000 francs, for his aid against the Hapsburg Dukes. In a manifesto to the towns of Strasbourg and Colmar, he disclaimed any hostile intention against them and stated the case of his inheritance. Thereafter, as the evidence dims, it is clear only that the project aborted. Some say that the Dukes of Austria recruited a powerful enemy of Montbéliard to immobilize his forces, others that Coucy was recalled by an urgent message from Charles V on September 30 requiring his service in the war against England. Forced to a decision, he was evidently able to make an acceptable case for his neutrality to the King, for at that point he vanishes, and for the next two years, except for a single reference, his history is blank.
The single reference places him in Prague, from where he dated a legal document of January 14, 1370, endowing an annuity of 40 marks sterling drawn from his English revenues on his senseschal, the Chanoine de Robersart. A journey to Prague would have been a natural effort to enlist the Emperor’s influence upon the Hapsburgs in behalf of his inheritance. Froissart was later to say that Coucy had “oftentimes” complained of his rights to the Emperor, who acknowledged their justice but professed inability to “constrain them of Austria, for they were strong in his country with many good men of war.”
After a documentary hiatus of 22 months, the next piece of evidence places Coucy in Savoy, where from November 1371 he was actively engaged with his cousin the Green Count against that nobleman’s inexhaustible supply of antagonists. In 1372–73 both together fought in Italy in the service of the Pope against the Visconti.
Since the fall of the Roman Empire, power had moved out of Italy, leaving political chaos in a land of cultural wealth. Italy’s cities throve in art and commerce, her agriculture developed greater skills than elsewhere, her bankers accumulated capital and a monopoly of finance in Europe, but the incessant strife of factions and the rending struggle for control between papacy and empire, Guelf and Ghibelline, brought Italy to the age of despots out of a craving for order. City-states, once the parents of republican autonomy, succumbed to Can Grandes, Malatestas, Visconti, who ruled by no title but force. Servile to tyrants—except for Venice, which kept its independent oligarchy, and Florence its Signoria—Italy was compared by Dante to both a slave and a brothel. No people talked more about unity and nationhood, and had less, than the Italians.
Partly as a result of these conditions foreign condottieri found a ready foothold in Italy. Bound by no loyalties, serving for gain rather than fealty, they nourished wars for their own benefit and protracted them as long as they could, while the hapless population suffered the effects. Merchants and pilgrims had to engage armed escorts. City gates were shut at night. The prior of a monastery near Siena moved all his possessions two or three times a year into the walled town “for fear of these companies.” A merchant of Florence, passing by a mountain village taken over by brigands, was set upon and though he cried aloud for help and the whole village heard him, no one dared come to his aid.
Yet even when roads are lawless and assault is normal, ordinary life has the same persistence as the growth of weeds. The great maritime republics of Venice and Genoa still brought to Europe the cargoes of the East, the Italian network of banking and credit still buzzed with invisible business, the weavers of Florence, the armorers of Milan, the glassblowers of Venice, the artisans of Tuscany still pursued their crafts under red-tiled roofs.
In mid-14th century the central political fact of Italy was the desperate effort of the Avignon papacy to maintain control of its temporal base in the Papal States. To govern this great band of middle Italy from outside the country was in fact impossible. The cost of the attempt was a series of ferocious wars, blood and massacre, oppressive taxation, alien and hated governors, and steadily increasing hostility to the papacy within its homeland.
Inevitably the effort to reconquer the Papal States collided with the expansion of Milan under the Visconti who had seized Bologna, a papal fief, in 1350 and threatened to become the dominant power of Italy. When the papal forces succeeded in regaining Bologna, Bernabò Visconti in an epic rage forced a priest to pronounce anathema upon the Pope from the top of a tower. Rejecting papal authority altogether, he seized ecclesiastical property, forced the Archbishop of Milan to kneel to him, forbade his subjects to pay tithes, seek pardons, or have any other dealings with the Curia, refused to accept papal appointees to benefices in his domain, tore up and trampled on papal missives. When he ignored a summons to Avignon to be sentenced for debaucheries, cruelties, and “diabolic hatred” of the Church, Urban V excommunicated him as a heretic in 1363 and, in one of the century’s more futile gestures, preached crusade against him. Hostile to the Avignon papacy for its worldliness, rapacity, and its very existence in the French orbit, Italians regarded Urban as no better than a French tool, and paid no attention to his call.
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 benefices, 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 firm 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 Ordelaffi, despot of Forlì, responded to excommunication by causing straw-stuffed images of the cardinals to be burned in the market place. Even Florence, though allied on and off with the papacy out of need to resist Milan, was anti-clerical and anti-papal in spirit. The Florentine chronicler Franco Sacchetti excused Ordelaffi’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 benefices, 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 five of the college in the first instance accompanied him. The greater part of the huge administrative structure was left at Avignon.
Urban’s first 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 flourishing studios of painting and sculpture. It did harbor one notable holy figure, 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 effort, 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 magnificent 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 unspecified 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 effect of supreme office.
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 Pontiff 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 fiefs 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 effect. 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 effectively. These tactics, designed to induce surrender, rapidly succeeded. Coucy’s conquest of three towns and siege of a fourth provoked a counter-offensive 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 fighting. 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 difficult 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 first 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 first payment to Coucy of 5,893 florins 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 florins.
At 20 florins 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 reflected 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 offer 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 effect 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 fifty 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 flood 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 fighting 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 confidently 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 five 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 fighting of his Milanese men-at-arms, who covered his escape from the field 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 field 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 affinity.
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 inflicted 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 fight 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 effort petered out when Amadeus fell ill. From that point, under heavy rains flooding rivers, assaults by Bernabò’s troops, and general lack of enthusiasm, the offensive 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 affairs 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 flattery 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 influence, Gregory’s war effort 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 effective—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 discomfiture 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 fields. 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 confiscation of property. Venice denied entry to all ships suspected of carrying infection, but with the flea and rat not yet implicated, the precautions, though groping in the right direction, failed to stop the carrier. At Piacenza, where Coucy’s war effort ended, half the population died, and at Pisa, where the plague lasted two years, it was said to have wiped out four fifths 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 floods 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 flagellants. They were chiefly 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 flagellants. 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 sufferers. The frenzy died out within a year, although it was to reappear on and off over the next two centuries. Whatever its cause, it testified 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 first time in thirty years. France now had a King who, if no captain, was a purposeful leader with a definite 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 effort 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 offered 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 office. 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 first 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 confidence 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 effected less honorably. Surrounded and trapped in a castle, Pedro conveyed an offer to Du Guesclin of six fiefs 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 effort 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 infirmity of body that he could scarcely sit upon his horse,” and as he grew heavier and weaker could not mount and was confined 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 fight 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 off 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, flowre 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 fleur-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 fired 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 inflamed 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 fierce and fell look,” swearing to cut off 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 different 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 fortifications 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 fifty 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 suffered 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 effort and hold back French forces from Aquitaine. His forces could rob villages and burn ripe wheat in the fields as they marched, but could take no fortified places nor provoke frontal battle. Without prospect of either ransoms or glory, his knights grew disaffected as they neared Paris, yet their threat was sufficiently 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 first 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 off 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 off 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 off 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 flaming 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 fleet 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 fleet 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 fiasco led indirectly to the tragic fate of England’s third great soldier, the Captal de Buch. While Edward’s fleet floundered offshore, 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 first 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 offered 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 fight 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 reflected 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 effort. 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 unfit 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 five months and almost 1,000 miles, to Aquitaine. Probably the intention of the famous, if indirect, offensive 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 find 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 off the country and gather loot, the army inflicted 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 fortified 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 off 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 nullified 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 financial 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.