While the peace parley was meeting at Leulinghen in May-June 1393, Coucy was conferring with Pope Clement in Avignon, where he had gone after settling the Savoyard quarrel. His mission was the start of a major thrust over the next two years to install Clement in Rome and the French in the Papal States, transformed into a Kingdom of Adria. Both efforts turned upon the cooperation of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, whose concern in the venture was not so much the fate of the papacy as the expansion of Milan. Although personally religious, he seems to have had no strong feelings about one Pope or another, nor about the schism except to use it in his own interests. His object was to break the power of Florence and Bologna by drawing France into Italy in alliance with Milan.
Introspective, intelligent, rich, and melancholy, Gian Galeazzo was the master of realpolitik in Italy. His grasp had reached across the north, absorbing Verona, Padua, Mantua, and Ferrara, and probed down into Tuscany and the Papal States. He may have been aiming at a Kingdom of Lombardy, perhaps even of a united Italy, or he may have been playing the game for power’s sake. In the politics of the schism, he ran a tortuous course between his Milanese subjects, who were loyal to the Roman Pope, and partnership with France, which meant opting for Clement. How he intended to sail through these straits was not clear. It was he, however, who had revived the idea that France should resume pursuit of the Kingdom of Adria, with his son-in-law Louis of Orléans as beneficiary. This scheme—which was now the object of Coucy’s mission—had been argued with fervor and finesse by Visconti’s seventy-year-old ambassador in Paris, Niccolo Spinelli, one of the ablest diplomats of the day. The Papal States, Spinelli argued, had earned nothing but hatred for the Holy See. In the thousand years since they had been given to the papacy, the most violent wars had been waged on their account, “yet the priests neither possess them in peace nor ever will be able to possess them.” It would be better that they should renounce temporal lordship entirely “as a burden not only for themselves but for all Christians, especially Italians.”
The French needed no persuasion to assume the burden, but they wanted the kingdom officially bestowed on Louis as a papal fief before they attempted its physical conquest. The Pope, however, wanted to have the Papal States in hand before he gave them away. Coucy, as the supreme persuader and the Frenchman best acquainted with the labyrinth of Italian politics, was charged with the task of convincing Clement to make the commitment in advance of conquest. He was accompanied on the mission by the Bishop of Noyon, a fellow member of the Royal Council known for his oratorical talants, and by the King’s secretary, Jean de Sains, to keep the record. In “eloquent discourse,” Coucy and the Bishop told the Pope that, failing a miracle, only the intervention of France could end the schism; alone Clement could do nothing. By enfeoffing Louis with the Kingdom of Adria, the Pope would regain a firm annual income from the patrimony, which had never been under papal control since the removal to Avignon. The King of France, the envoys said, recommended his brother as the person best fitted to undertake the conquest because “he is young and can work hard” and will have the aid of the Lord of Milan.
Clement balked on the grounds that he did not want to be known as the “liquidator of the papal heritage.” That had not bothered him ten years before when he had given the Bull of Enfeoffment to the Duc d’Anjou, but he was no longer so sure of French capacity. Three French cardinals were called in for advice, including Jean de La Grange, Cardinal of Amiens, he who had once frightened Charles VI by his supposed intercourse with a familiar demon. He wanted some hard answers: how much money, how many men would France commit to the campaign, and how long would they be maintained in Italy? He wanted a promise of 2,000 men-at-arms led by substantial captains and nobles and supported by 600,000 francs a year for three years. The embarrassed envoys could not reply; their instructions of no less than seventeen “items” had contained nothing about military specifics. Cardinal de La Grange suggested smoothly that the Duc d’Orléans might begin his campaign and be enfeoffed with what he conquered as he progressed. Although they stayed for six weeks, Coucy and the Bishop could obtain no more than Clement’s promise to send his own envoys to Paris for further discussion.
In France, the failure to conclude peace and the renewal of the King’s madness—intensifying, the struggle between Burgundy and Orléans—weakened the impetus for the Way of Force. The French were not prepared to move into Italy until they had settled with England. Indeed, when the English got wind of French plans, they conveyed a warning that they would break the truce if France took up arms against the Roman Pope. Mistrusting Gloucester’s war party, the French sent heralds through the realm to order strengthening of defenses and repair of crumbling walls. In a renewed effort to train archers, an ordinance was issued prohibiting games. Tennis, which the common people were adopting in imitation of the nobles, and soules, a form of field hockey popular with the bourgeois and seldom played without broken bones, as well as dice and cards, were banned in the hope of encouraging practice in archery and the crossbow. This was the same effort Charles V had made in 1368 and it shows that the rulers were acutely conscious of the failure of French archery.
Skills were not lacking; the trouble was that French tactics did not allow archery an essential place. Combined action of archers and knights was not adopted; crossbow companies were hired and barely used. The reason was clearly a mixture of contempt for the commoner and fear for chivalry’s primacy in battle. By 1393 the added fear of insurrection caused the new ordinance to have a short life. After a period during which practice with the bow and crossbow became very popular, the nobles insisted that the ban on games be revoked, fearing that the common people would gain too effective a weapon against the noble estate. They were caught in that common irony of human endeavor when one self-interest cancels out another.
Conflicting pressures were rising around the Voie de Fait. The Florentines sent an imposing mission of sixteen envoys to Paris to plead against a French alliance with Gian Galeazzo. They found an ally in the Duke of Burgundy, who, because of his Flemish subjects, had never been a strong partisan of Clement and was certainly not prepared to help him to Rome if it meant advancing Louis to be King of Adria as well as Regent. The Duke in turn found an ally—although he despised her—in Queen Isabeau, who would have supped with the Devil to harm Gian Galeazzo.
Publicly, the strongest influence against the Voie de Fait was that of the University, stronghold of the intellectual clerical establishment. Clerics of the University had never been happy with the Babylon of Avignon. Its consequences in simony and corruption and increasing materialism, in loss of prestige, in rise of protest and movements of dissent among Lollards and mystics, in nationalism stimulated by the French attempt to dominate the papacy and sharpened by rival states taking opposite sides in the sehism, had brought the Church to low esteem. Historically, the breaking-up of the old unity of the Faith and the rise of nationalism were advanced, but not caused, by the schism. On the river of history, universality lay behind and break-up ahead, but men see what is immediately at hand and what they saw at the close of the 14th century was the schism’s damage to society and a desperate need to re-unite the Church.
The faculty of theology was now openly advocating the Way of Cession despite the edict banning discussion of the subject. Gerson, in oral defense of his thesis on “Spiritual Jurisdiction” for a degree in theology in 1392, provided the doctrinal basis for mutual abdication of the popes. “If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished,” he argued, and boldly asserted that to retain authority in such case was mortal sin. Further, anyone who did not actively aid in ending the schism was morally guilty of prolonging it. This was a pointed reference to clerics willing enough to live with two papacies because of the increased number of benefices the situation provided. Gerson’s public statement in Paris was a signal of the growing pressure, emphasized by Chancellor d’Ailly’s presence in the chair. It attested also to Burgundy’s protection, without which Gerson could never have dared to be so forthright.
In opposition, the drive for Italy was suddenly galvanized by a new offer made to Louis d’Orléans. He was asked to accept the sovereignty of Genoa, where domestic strife had reached that baleful point at which the foreigner is invited in. Whether the scheme was inspired by Gian Galeazzo, who wanted Genoa as a port for Milan, is unknown, but he clearly favored it in the belief that under his son-in-law’s sovereignty, Genoa would be at his disposal. For Louis it was an extraordinary stroke of fortune, a foothold in the sun more achievable than his cousin Anjou’s still unrealized claim to Naples, and a major step on the way to Adria.
His first act was to send Coucy again to Avignon accompanied by his personal representative, Jean de Trie, in addition to the Bishop of Noyon and the King’s secretary as before. They were to ask again for the enfeoffment of Adria while postponing its conquest and the march on Rome for three or four years. The delay was intended to give Louis time to succeed in Genoa. Again the cardinals bargained closely—for money, for troops, for signed commitments by Charles and his brother, and other conditions which virtually precluded the Way of Force. But Clement at long last may have recognized that he was only precluding what had never been feasible. After many delays and excuses, which kept Coucy and his colleagues in Avignon for three months, they succeeded in obtaining the document of enfeoffment, to be confirmed as a Bull only when the King of France and his brother had approved the conditions. The envoys left Avignon on September 3, 1394. Two weeks later their entire effort was revealed as vain when they heard the stunning news that Clement was dead.
The schism which had raised Clement to the papacy was his executioner, by the hand of the University of Paris. Since January, when King Charles had recovered his reason, the University had been pressing hard for an audience to present its views. So far, the Duc de Berry, as Clement’s warmest partisan, had blocked any such hearing, answering the University’s appeals with violent reproaches and threats to “put to death and throw into the river the principal promoters of this affair.” These vigorous sentiments were induced by “rich presents” received from Clement, who, having learned of the University’s intentions, sent Cardinal de Luna to Paris to exert the financial persuasion that Berry best understood. At some point Burgundy must have offered his brother cogent argument to the contrary, for, in a surprising reversal, Berry suddenly replied to petitioners, “If you find a remedy acceptable to the Council, we will adopt it that very hour.”
Cession, as enunciated by Gerson, was already the University’s remedy. To give it as much public weight as possible, the faculty organized a popular referendum, with a ballot box placed in the cloister of St. Mathurin in which people were to drop their votes for a solution. From 10,000 votes counted by 54 masters of the different faculties, three solutions emerged, not including the Way of Force. Referendums do not commonly endorse an unwanted result. The Three Ways now proposed were, first, mutual abdication; second, if both popes continued obdurate, arbitration by a selected group; third, a General Council of the Church. The last was considered least desirable because a General Council was believed certain to divide into existing factions from which the schism would emerge as alive as ever.
Destined to dominate the opening decades of the next century, recourse to a Council was already a lengthening shadow. Both popes naturally detested it because it detracted from their authority. The theory of conciliar supremacy held that supreme authority in the Church lay in the General Council, from which the Pope derived his powers. “Some perverse men,” raged Clement’s rival, Boniface IX, “trusting in the arm of the flesh against the Lord, call for a Council. O damned and damnable impiety!”
Nevertheless, as hope of joint abdication faded, theologians on both sides increasingly discussed a Council and debated its problems. Who would convoke it? What was its legitimacy if convoked by temporal rulers? Did it have authority over the person of a Pope? If summoned by one pontificate in the present impasse, would its decisions be accepted by the other? How might both popes and both hierarchies ever be persuaded to act in concert? On June 30, 1394, a French royal audience heard the forbidden subject relentlessly exposed.
Arranged by Philip of Burgundy to present the University’s findings from the referendum, the audience was held in great solemnity. The King was on his throne, with the royal Dukes and principal prelates, nobles, and ministers in attendance. The argument for cession in the form of a 23-page letter to the King was read by the Rector of the University, Nicolas de Clamanges, a friend of Gerson and d’Ailly. One of the humanists within the University, he was considered the finest Latin stylist in France and an orator unmatched for his “Ciceronian eloquence.”
Clerical polemic in the Middle Ages was not cool. In a tirade of invective hurled at both popes, Clamanges piled up passion and hyperbole in his depiction of the suffering of the Church and the urgent and immediate need for a cure. Whichever of the two popes refused to accept one of the Three Ways, he proclaimed, should be treated as a “hardened schismatic and consequently a heretic”; a ravisher, not a pastor, of his flock; a “devouring wolf,” not a shepherd, who should be driven from the fold of Christendom. If in their overconfidence the popes postponed any longer the offered remedy, they “will repent too late of having neglected reform … the harm will be incurable.… The world, for so long unhappy, is now on a dangerous slope toward evil.”
“Do you think,” he cried, in the eternal voice of protest, “that people will suffer forever your bad government? Who do you think can endure, among so many other abuses, your mercenary appointments, your multiple sale of benefices, your elevation of men without honesty or virtue to the most eminent positions?” Every day prelates are appointed who “know nothing of saintliness, nothing of honesty.” Exposed to their extortions, “the priesthood has become a misery reduced to profaning its calling … by selling relics and crosses and chalices and putting at auction the mystic rites of the sacrament.” Some churches hold no services at all. If the early Church fathers returned to earth, “they would find no vestige of their piety, no remnant of their devotion, no shadow of the Church they knew.”
He spoke of Christianity as a laughingstock among the infidels, who hope that “our Church thus divided against herself will destroy herself by her own hands.” He pointed to the rise of heretics, whose poison “like gangrene makes progress every day.” He predicted that worse would come as internal strife within the Catholic Faith promoted dissension and disrespect. He raised all the arguments against a General Council and deflated each, quoting the Old Testament—Psalms, the Prophets, and the Book of Job—to establish its authority. “Has there ever been, will there ever be,” he thundered, “a more urgent necessity for a Council than at this moment when the whole Church is convulsed in its discipline, its morals, its laws, its institutions, its traditions and oldest practices, spiritual as well as temporal—at this moment when it is menaced by frightful and irreparable ruin?”
Turning to the King, he did not hesitate to refer to Charles’s personal tragedy, saying that if God had answered prayers to restore the King, it must be that he might awake to the interests of his people and of Holy Church, to eradicate “this horrible schism” and the miseria in its train. In the name of the University, he exhorted Charles to take the lead at once in working for a remedy if he did not wish to lose his title as Most Christian King.
Ignorant of Latin, the language of the oration, Charles listened graciously without understanding a word. Afterward a translation was ordered for the Royal Council, whose lay members, too, evidently knew no Latin. Clamanges’ impassioned plea was ignored. Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate, and the politics that the court was currently engaged in was the effort, promoted by Louis and resisted by Burgundy, to establish Louis in Italy. The University was ordered by the King—or in his name—to abstain from further agitation. Its reply was to suspend courses in what amounted to a strike by the faculty, a method used successfully against a tax levy in 1392 although at the cost of many foreign students leaving Paris.
The University also circulated Clamanges’ letter throughout Europe, not least to the See of Avignon, where it was presented to the Pope in a full assembly of cardinals. After reading a few lines, Clement’s eyes filled with anger and he exclaimed, “This letter defames the Holy See! It is wicked, it is venomous!” Denouncing it as a calumny that “does not deserve to be read in public or private,” he left the room in a rage and would neither listen nor speak to anyone. The cardinals read the letter through and, after conferring among themselves, concluded that postponement was indeed dangerous and that the Pope would have to accept the University’s program. Summoned by Clement when he learned of their conference, they advised him that if he had the good of the Church at heart he must choose one of the Three Ways. Such was his indignation at this “traitorous cowardice” that within three days, on September 16, he died of a heart attack or apoplectic stroke, or, according to his contemporaries, of “profound chagrin.” So ended Robert of Geneva, to be ultimately recorded as Anti-Pope by the Church.
The news of his death reached Paris six days later on September 22. Here at last was the moment to re-unite the Church painlessly, without use of force or a General Council—if the election of a successor to Clement could be prevented. “Never again will there be such an opportunity,” wrote the University to the cardinals; “it is as though the Holy Ghost stood at the door and knocked.” The Royal Council immediately dispatched a message in the name of the King to the Avignon cardinals, exhorting them “in the interests of all Christianity” to postpone their conclave until they received a “special and solemn” letter from the King of France which would follow.
Led by Marshal Boucicaut, the royal messengers galloped for Avignon, covering the 400 miles in the record time of four days. When they arrived, the conclave was already in session. The cardinals were anxious for union, but not at their own expense. They had been persuaded by the suave Spaniard, Cardinal de Luna, a former professor of canon law, that their position depended on their right of election, which must not be abridged. Divining the contents of the King’s letter, they decided not to open it until the election was accomplished. But lest they be charged with sustaining the schism, they agreed to sign a written oath binding whichever of them was elected to resign if a majority of the cardinals called on him to do so. The oath bound them to work diligently for union of the Church “without fraud, deceit or machination whatsoever,” and sincerely to examine without excuse or delay all possible ways to that goal “even to the point of ceding the papacy, if necessary.” Eighteen of 21 cardinals signed, among them the most fervent exponent of union, Cardinal Pedro de Luna of Aragon.
In the conclave, when the name of one cardinal was proposed for election, he confessed in an agony of honesty, “I am weak and perhaps would not abdicate. Do not expose me to temptation!”
“I on the other hand,” spoke up Cardinal de Luna, “would abdicate as easily as I take off my hat.” All eyes turned to look at the colleague, now in his sixties, who had been a cardinal ever since the stormy election in Rome that had precipitated the schism. A learned and clever man of noble birth, subtle in diplomacy, austere in private life, an expert manipulator, he was a rigid opponent of Council though an ardent advocate of union. He was elected as Clement’s successor on September 28, taking the name of Benedict XIII.
The second French embassy heard the news on their way to Avignon. On their arrival, the new Pope assured them of his intent to pursue every means of ending the schism and repeated his statement that he would abdicate if so advised as easily as taking off his hat, which he lifted from his head in illustration. His assurances in reply to the King mounted like a ladder to Heaven. He had accepted election only to end the “damnable schism,” and would rather spend the rest of his life in “desert or cloister” than prolong it; if the King sent well-informed persons with definite proposals, he would accept them without hesitation and “execute them without fail”; he was “disposed, determined and resolved” to work for union and would accept the counsel of the King and his uncles “so that they rather than another prince may acquire the eternal glory that shall be the reward of so meritorious an effort.”
De Luna may have been sincere but once he was on the papal throne, the duty to abdicate was fast replaced by the sense of right that supreme office breeds. The schism, like the war, was a trap not easy to get out of.
All this time Coucy had been in north Italy conducting, on behalf of Louis d’Orléans, a financial, political, and military campaign for the sovereignty of Genoa. The offer had come out of the city’s chronic anarchy: the Grimaldi, Doria, Spinola, and other noble families, having been exiled and lacking cohesion, wanted a sovereign to restore them and deliver the city from bourgeois rule. Power swung from one bourgeois group to another, each of which installed a Doge until he was overthrown and exiled by opponents. No fewer than five Doges held office in 1393, giving way in 1394 to the return of Adorno, the Doge of the Tunisian campaign. Doges, parties, and exiled nobles exerted their various weights in the fluctuating balance of power between Florence and Milan.
As Lieutenant and Procurator General “in trans-alpine parts” for the Duc d’Orléans, Coucy established himself at Asti, which belonged to Louis as part of Valentina’s dowry. He commanded some 400 lances and 230 archers recruited from among the best in France, and engaged an almost equal number of Gascon and Italian mercenaries. But without greatly superior numbers he could not expect to subdue Genoese territories by military conquest alone, if the local rulers were disposed to defend them. As in Normandy many years before, his strategy was to take castles and towns by negotiation backed by a show of force and assault only when required.
The nobles who had made the original proposal came to offer him their castles, but, being “prudent and subtle” and having experience of Lombards and Genoese, Coucy did not trust too much in their promises and took care not to put himself in their power, even to the point of holding conferences in open fields rather than inside castle premises. Collaboration with the Genoese in Tunisia must have left an unpleasant impression.
Guided by Gian Galeazzo, who arranged contacts and lent money and soldiers, Coucy pushed his way through the Italian maze, recruiting and paying mercenary companies, negotiating the terms and price for submission of castles and territories, treating with Pisa and Lucca for their non-interference, sending out envoys to other parts of Italy to gather adhesions for the future Kingdom of Adria. The paper work was substantial, and through its survival in the archives a 14th century politico-military campaign can be seen at work. Recruiting was piecemeal: Guedon de Foissac comes with 2 knights, 19 squires, and 10 archers, Aimé de Miribel with 26 men-at-arms, Hennequin Wautre with 16 archers. Six Italian companies range in size from 10 to 350 “cavaliers.” Bonnerel de Grimaut (probably Grimaldi) receives 100 gold florins for “showing the ways and means” by which the enterprise of Savona can be accomplished. Jerome de Balart, doctor of laws, and Luquin Mourre, squire, receive 100 gold florins for advice in the same project.
The territory of Savona, which had revolted against the Doge, is the crux of the advance, requiring delicate negotiations. When Gascon mercenaries are about to subject one of its vassal towns to “fire and blood” in revenge for the killing of three of their horses, they have to be hastily bought off at a cost of 96 écus, not too much to avoid hostilities which would make the cost of conquest greater. The approaches to Savona are opened by deals with surrounding lords for permission to pass through the valleys they command. Finally, Savona with its towns and castles is secured by “secret treaties” and payment of 6,990 gold florins.
Each castle whose allegiance is obtained is required to fly the Orléans flag and each lord is reimbursed by monthly installments on an agreed sum “until such time as the Duc d’Orléans is made master of Genoa.” Forty members of the Spinola family receive collectively 1,400 florins a month for their allegiance and agreement to billet Coucy’s forces in their towns and fortresses. Records of each transaction in the precise and architectural handwriting of the time make it plain that when knighthood was in flower, one of its primary interests was money.
The notaries who drew up these agreements and the ambassadors who confirmed them had to be paid, as well as couriers to and from Paris. Wages to men-at-arms and retainers to captains of companies were recorded, likewise twenty florins to Antonio de Cove, cannoneer, to fetch a grosse bombarde from a certain lord for the siege of a castle; eighteen florins to an envoy sent by Coucy to Pavia to borrow 400 florins from Gian Galeazzo; a silver goblet and ewer to Gian Galeazzo’s secretary.
Not surprisingly, Coucy was constantly running out of ready cash, but the banking and credit network of the time kept him in operation. It enabled him to borrow 12,000 florins from one Boroumeus de Boroumeis, merchant of Milan, to be repaid by Orléans to the brothers Jacques and Franchequin Jouen, merchant-grocers of Paris. At another time Coucy pawned jewels and plate to pay his men-at-arms until 40,000 livres were brought by Orléans’ chamberlain from Paris.
In November, after receiving plenipotentiary powers from the King of France and the Duc d’Orléans, Coucy concluded a treaty with Savona covering a mass of rights, guarantees, and obligations almost as complex as the Treaty of Brétigny. With this in hand, he moved to Pavia to arrange the definitive terms of Gian Galeazzo’s share in the present venture and in the future Voie de Fait.
Twenty-one years had passed since Coucy and Gian Galeazzo had fought on opposite sides in the Battle of Montichiari. Did they reminisce over old times and remind each other how each had barely escaped with his life? Or were their relations purely formal? Did they compare notes on their respective monastic foundations, Coucy’s for the Célestins at Soissons, Gian Galeazzo’s for the Carthusians at Pavia, and did the Italian Prince say, as he had elsewhere, that he intended to build one “which will have no like in the world”? He did not live to see his boast fulfilled in the famous Certosa of Pavia.
He would doubtless have conducted Coucy through his archive of state papers and certainly through his library, whose collection had been started for his father by Petrarch. It contained the poet’s copy of Vergil as well as his own and Boccaccio’s works and Dante’s Commedia. Steadily expanded by Gian Galeazzo’s purchases to more than 900 volumes, it rivaled the library of Charles V at the Louvre and was open to bibliophiles and scholars whom the lord of Pavia liked to attract to his court. Its glories were the illuminated manuscripts he commissioned. Regardless of text, which might be Pliny or Horace, they illustrated the contemporary world in plants and animals, medical procedures, wedding processions, ships, castles, battles, banquets, and, not least, in the supreme Visconti Hours, in three portraits of Gian Galeazzo himself. The artist, Giovanni dei Grassi, surrounded by his pots of pigment and precious gold leaf, was at work on the Hours in the year of Coucy’s visit.
Undoubtedly Coucy would have seen the rising construction of the Milan Cathedral, of which his host had laid the foundations in 1386 in pious gratitude for his successful ouster of the impious Bernabò. While Gian Galeazzo gave a monthly subsidy of 500 florins, the building was a product of the popular will, pursued with an impulse so vigorous that the pillars of the nave were already completed. Participation and funds came from all classes. The Guild of Armorers came in a body to begin the work of carrying away rubble in baskets. Not to be outdone, the Drapers followed, then the College of Notaries, government officials, nobles, and others in a steady stream of voluntary labor. Districts of the city vied with each other in contributions. When the Porta Orientale gave an ass worth fifty lire and a day’s work on the excavations, the Porta Vercellina gave a calf worth 150 lire. In the record of donations the whole of society appears: consecutive entries list three lire, four soldi from “Raffalda, prostitute,” and 160 lire from the secretary of Valentina dei Visconti, Duchesa d’Orléans.
Coucy concluded two treaties with the lord of Milan, one providing for a joint force to take Genoa, the other concerning the Voie de Fait. In the second treaty Visconti undertook to provide a certain number of lances if the King of France came to Italy in person, and a more limited number if the leader were Orléans or—which was hardly likely—the Duke of Burgundy.
The reason for the reference to Burgundy remains hidden in the enigmatic statecraft of Gian Galeazzo. He was a ruler who always played both sides in pursuit of his goal and was prepared to abandon one for the other when necessary. In his need of an ally against Florence and Bologna, he could see that France, with an unstable King and a struggle between uncle and nephew for control of policy, was a shifting proposition, and the Voie de Fait, since the death of Clement, a fading prospect. While negotiating with Coucy, he was already mending relations with his technical overlord, the Emperor Wenceslas, who, like himself, needed support against domestic enemies. To confirm his imperial title, Wenceslas would have to undertake that hazard of emperors, the journey to Rome for formal coronation by the Pope. Visconti wealth would make it possible. In exchange for 100,000 florins in 1395, Wenceslas sold Gian Galeazzo the title of hereditary Duke of Milan with sovereignty over 25 cities. As the first such title in Italy, it marked the line where the age of city-states passed into the age of despots. It did not help Wenceslas, who was charged by his opponents with illegally alienating imperial territory and was ultimately deposed before ever becoming secure enough to make the journey to Italy.
While Coucy pushed forward the campaign against Genoa, another deal was arranged behind his back. A coalition of Florence, Burgundy, and Queen Isabeau induced Doge Adorno, as a means of keeping himself in office, to offer the sovereignty of Genoa to Charles VI, effectively thwarting Orléans and Visconti. On the edge of renewed madness in 1395, Charles could be manipulated. In the “grievous March” of that year, on being informed that the King had bought out Louis’ interests in Genoa for 300,000 francs, Coucy discovered himself acting for a different principal. On the crown’s instructions, he now negotiated a truce with the Doge Adorno, who promptly broke it by laying siege to regain Savona. In the course of the defense Coucy was immobilized for four days in July by a “wounded leg,” which may have been a fresh injury or an effect of the old injury suffered ten years before. He can be glimpsed only intermittently in the documents, like a patch of sky through moving clouds.
By August the siege of Savona was raised, the sovereignty of Genoa confirmed in the King of France, and Coucy’s campaign brought to an end. He is last seen with a suite of 120 horsemen leaving Asti on October 13 and reaching Turin the same evening on his way to yet another crossing of the Alps. On his return to France, Louis welcomed him with a gift—or a payment—of 10,000 francs “to help him over all he had suffered in Italy.” In fact Coucy had gained for the crown of France, if not for the Duc d’Orléans, the long-sought foothold in Italy. French rule of Genoa was formally established in the following year. Overthrown by a popular uprising in 1409, it left a claim which Charles’s and Louis’ descendants, Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I, were still pursuing into the 16th century.
While Coucy was engaged against Genoa, court and University coalesced in a concerted effort to unseat Benedict XIII. Although they knew him well, the French were offended by the election of a Spaniard, and he, though nobly born, did not have the kinship with Valois, Bourbons, and Counts of Savoy which had made Clement, from the French point of view, “one of us.” An end to the schism became the more imperative as the tocsin for crusade rang more insistently. Hungarian ambassadors were on their way to France; the Patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria had already arrived with a tale of woe.
Just as the humble Archbishop of Bari turned into a bully overnight as Urban VI, so the subtle and diplomatic Pedro de Luna turned righteous and inflexible as Benedict XIII. A heart-rending plea by the University not to put off “for a day, an hour, an instant” his intention to abdicate left Benedict unmoved, although the rhetoric of which Clamanges was again the author would have penetrated a conscience of granite. By resigning he would gain, wrote the University, “eternal honor, imperishable renown, a chorus of universal praise and immortal glory.” If he postponed by one day, a second would follow, then a third. His spirit will weaken, flatterers and place-seekers will come with sweet words and gifts; under the mask of friendship, “they will poison your mind with fear of evil consequences and cool your zeal for this noble and difficult enterprise.” The sweetness of honors and power will take hold. “If you are ready today, why wait until tomorrow? If you are not ready today, you will be less so tomorrow.” The peace and health of the Church are in his hands. Should his rival refuse to abdicate when Benedict does, he will have condemned himself as “the most perverse schismatic,” and proved to all Catholics the necessity of ousting him.
Unilateral abdication did not appeal to Benedict, nor was he persuaded that its moral effect could dislodge his rival. When Chancellor d’Ailly and his ardent and vocal colleague Gilles Deschamps came to Avignon as the King’s ambassadors to add pressure, they found that the former De Luna’s easy promise of taking off his hat had given way to a Spanish stubbornness bred “in the country of good mules.”
Pressure was augmented in Paris. In February 1395 a conference of 109 prelates and learned clerics was convened in the King’s name to decide on how to end the schism. After two weeks’ deliberation, attended by archbishops, bishops, abbés, and doctors of theology, it voted 87 to 22 for the Way to Cession and renunciation of the Way of Force. Not entirely a matter of conviction, the vote reflected the ascendancy of the Duke of Burgundy. Prelates and theologians dependent for place on the patronage of one or another of the royal Dukes watched carefully the trend of events. Accordingly, as Burgundy or Orléans rose in power—usually Burgundy when the King was mad and Orléans when he was sane—their attitudes shifted, preventing a coherent policy.
The majority of the conference now renounced the Voie de Fait. It was declared “too perilous” and likely to involve the King of France in wars against all those obedient to the “Intruder” in Rome. Even if Boniface were defeated, said the prelates, the nations of England, Italy, Germany, and Hungary would still not accept Benedict XIII and “the schism would be stronger than it is now.” The only hope was for Benedict to put his abdication in the hands of the King of France, who would then call upon his fellow sovereigns of the other obedience to obtain that of Boniface likewise. Despite the obvious flaws in this procedure, a decision for cession was clearly what the crown wanted. Without a French Pope as its beneficiary, the Way of Force had lost its attraction.
Adria and conquest of the Papal States vanished with the Voie de Fait, and with it any prospect for Benedict of ousting his rival by force of French arms. To convince him of this, the crown dispatched the most imposing embassy ever sent to Avignon, consisting of all three royal Dukes—Burgundy, Berry, and Orléans—supported by ten delegates of the University. Though softened by splendid gifts of Burgundian wines and Flemish tapestries, the message was a conscious assertion of royal will over the Church. It met an opponent unsurpassed in the techniques of evasion.
The issue was debated in polished discourse at a series of audiences, each opening on an appropriate text, with the usual “flowers of rhetoric” and many canonical and historical citations by each side. As a former professor at Montpellier, Benedict was not to be put down by the academics from Paris. While continually reasserting his willingness to work until death for union, he refused to be cornered into abdicating without a bilateral guarantee. Since here was the glaring weakness of the French case, he may have suspected that the French wanted him out mainly in order to install a French Pope in his place—and he may have been right. He twisted and evaded as the hunters pursued. When they demanded to see the text of the oath signed by the cardinals in conclave, he first refused, then offered to tell the substance in secret, then, when further pressed, to read it aloud without handing it over. When that too was rejected, he claimed a kind of executive privilege on the ground that resolutions of the conclave could not be communicated to anyone.
Forced to yield, he proposes a joint conference of both popes and both sets of cardinals. The visitors say this is impossible because of the Intruder’s obstinacy, and that Benedict’s voluntary cession is what is wanted. He asks for the proposal in writing. Gilles Deschamps replies that that is not necessary since it consists of but one word of two syllables: “cession.” The Pope asks for time to reflect. During the pause, Burgundy invites the cardinals to give him their opinion “in good conscience as private persons, not as members of the Sacred College.” They favor cession nineteen to one, the lone opponent being the Cardinal of Pampeluna, another Spaniard. When the cardinals put their opinion in writing, Benedict forbids them to sign the document. At an audience from which he excludes the University delegates he informs the Dukes that if they will support him, he will abandon to them the conquest and possession of the Papal States. They are deaf to the proposal.
The discussions have now lasted for two months, with the visitors coming across the river every day from Villeneuve, where they are staying. They discover one morning that during the night someone has burned the famous bridge by setting fire to boats moored to the piles. At once fearing “treason” and attack, they seize arms, but on second thought suspect the Pope. If the Spaniard is laughing on the other bank, it is privately. Swearing he has had nothing to do with the fire, he sends workmen to repair the bridge and arrange a temporary pontoon of boats tied together, hardly suitable for proud Dukes to ride across in dignity. The only alternative is crossing by boat, which is slow and insecure against the rushing waters. Disgusted, the visitors after consultation with the cardinals decide on one last appeal, which Benedict, still affirming his devotion to union, rejects. Defeated, the French depart after three months of empty effort. The schism remains unresolved.
With no assurance that his abdication would end the schism, Benedict cannot bear all the blame. Astonishingly, he won a champion in Nicolas de Clamanges, who had so furiously prophesied doom if the popes postponed abdication by a single day. In a decision which caused a storm at the University he now accepted office as Benedict’s secretary, and was later to write of him that “though gravely accused, he was great and laudable and I believe him to have been a saintly man nor do I know anyone more praiseworthy.” Did Nicolas act from conviction or was he bought? Since his motives are lost to us, let us believe them sincere.
Outraged by the outcome of its efforts, all the more because Benedict’s original words had nourished high hopes, the University proposed two radical measures: it advised the King to withhold from Benedict the ecclesiastical revenues of France, a step amounting to a break with Avignon; and it advised the cardinals that if Benedict continued to refuse cession, he should be deposed by a General Council. The crown was not yet prepared to withhold obedience, though it was to come to that stage three years later. Fourteen years were to pass before Europe could achieve the momentary unity for a General Council, which even then did not succeed.
The University kept up its campaign. Letters went to rulers and other universities urging them to insist on cession by both popes. Doctors of Theology journeyed forth on horseback to preach in towns and provinces against the evils of the schism. In the course of denouncing the corruptions of the Church, they spread—with results they may not have intended—the demand for reform. The French crown sent envoys to the King of England and princes of Germany urging the way of mutual cession, and received everyone’s earnest concurrence with as yet little practical result. Benedict XIII resisted every pressure. For nearly thirty years to come, despite French withdrawal of obedience, siege of Avignon, desertion by his cardinals, deposition by two Councils, and the rivalry of three other popes, he would not step down. Retreating to a Spanish fortress, he died in 1422 at the age of 94 still maintaining his claim.
Unexpectedly, the war, if not the schism, gave promise of ending at last. In March 1395, Richard II proposed a marriage between himself and Isabelle, daughter of the King of France. He was 29 years old, she six. As a way of by-passing the unyielding disputes to gain peace by other means, it was a bold move, even if peace was not its only motive.
Richard II had no use for what he termed this “intolerable war,” nor did he share the animosity for France it had bred in most Englishmen. On the contrary, he admired France, desired to meet her King, and wanted peace in order to strengthen himself against his domestic opponents. He had ruled constitutionally for seven years since his rough treatment by the Lords Appellant, but his autocratic nature, intensified by that humiliation, craved absolute monarchy and the subjection of his enemies. Kingship, which can corrupt or improve, seems to have had a generally one-sided effect in the 14th century: only Charles V gained wisdom from responsibility. Richard was moody, profligate, despotic, emotional, and temperamentally if not physically aggressive. When his wife, Anne of Bohemia, sister of Wenceslas, died in 1394, he indulged the passion of his grief by ordering the royal manor of Sheen to be destroyed because she had died there. At her funeral, believing himself insulted by the behavior of the Earl of Arundel, one of the Lords Appellant, the King seized a staff and struck him to the ground.
Anne had been a sweet-natured woman of his own age who inspired, unlike her unhappy brother, only the most benign comments in the chronicles. Her death may have loosened some restraining influence, besides leaving Richard without a direct heir. To ensure his line, a second marriage was advisable, but the choice of a six-year-old child who was expressly spared consummation of the marriage until she was twelve suggests that an heir was not Richard’s primary object. He wanted reconciliation with France in order to close off opportunities to the “boars” of England and, quite specifically, to gain French support, if need be, against them. His envoys were instructed to obtain assurance from the French King and from his uncles and brother “to aid and sustain Richard with all their power against any of his subjects.”
That was hardly a normal request by one King of another, especially one so lately and still technically his enemy. Richard was only two years away from his grasp at absolute monarchy, the murder of Gloucester, the execution of Arundel, the banishment of Norfolk and Henry of Lancaster, and the series of compulsive provocations which in two more years were to lose him his crown and finally his life. Modern historians have suggested that in his last years he was overtaken by mental disease, but that is only a modern view of the malfunction common to 14th century rulers: inability to inhibit impulse.
Richard was King in a time of increasing tensions, suppressed but not eased since the Peasants’ Revolt. Lawless bands of marauding knights and archers still spread disorder, heavy taxes were a constant complaint, Lollardy, despite the efforts to stamp it out, flickered everywhere. Its social no less than religious threat united crown and Church against it: the days of John of Gaunt’s alliance with Wyclif were gone, although Lollards appeared in high places. During the Parliament of 1394–95 the movement suddenly surfaced with an inflammatory public statement of twelve “conclusions and truths for the reformation of Holy Church in England.”
Supported by several members of the House of Commons, including the ever troublesome Sir Richard Stury and another knight who were both members of the Privy Council, a petition for the twelve reforms, written in English, was presented as a bill to Parliament. Simultaneously it was pinned in public view on the doors of St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. The Twelve Conclusions were a mirror of the late medieval Church as seen by the dissatisfied; by those who wanted to believe and have faith but felt blocked by encrusted materialism and idolatry. They were the conclusions Wyclif had reached one by one, beginning with the two most threatening to Church and priesthood: temporal disendowment and denial of the “supposed miracle” of transubstantiation. Other rituals denounced in the list were vows of chastity, which in priests encouraged vice, and in women, who were “by nature frail and imperfect,” led to many horrible sins; consecration or exorcism of physical objects, which was nothing but “jugglery,” akin to necromancy; and pilgrimages to deaf images of wood and stone, which were a form of idolatry. The Tenth Conclusion was new—a virtual denial of the right to kill. It asserted that manslaughter in battle or by court of justice for any temporal cause was expressly contrary to the New Testament.
So alarmed were the bishops by the Twelve Conclusions that they summoned Richard home from Ireland, where he then was, to decree new measures of suppression. The King himself, in fury at the heresy, threatened to kill Sir Richard Stury “by the foulest death that may be” if he ever broke the oath to recant that was forced upon him. The Twelve Conclusions, however, were beyond the sovereign’s power to kill. Lollardy had already found a response in Queen Anne’s Bohemian retinue and through them formed a connection between the ideas of Wyclif and Jan Hus.
Richard’s proposal of marriage, broached before the French Dukes went to Avignon, was not unanimously welcomed. Philippe de Mézières was its ardent advocate in the interests of crusade, as was the Duke of Burgundy in the interests of commerce. But the hostility of half a century was not easily dissipated. Berry and Orléans were both opposed, and when the proposal was debated in the French Council, several members objected on the ground that a marriage without a peace was unnatural. Coucy, if he had not been absent in Italy, might have shared that attitude. An incident of the same year shows him leaning over backward—perhaps because of his special connections—to maintain the formal relationship between enemies, even during a period of truce. Asked by Froissart, who was preparing to visit England, for letters of introduction to Richard and his uncles, Coucy refused “because he was a Frenchman” to write to the King, although he gave Froissart a letter to his daughter Philippa. If a letter to the King of England was impolitic, marriage to the King of England must indeed have appeared radical.
In the Council, Arnaud de Corbie, the Chancellor, advised acceptance on the ground that the marriage bond would strengthen the English King against the war party in his own country. The interests of peace prevailed. In July, 1,200 French gentlemen escorted a formal English embassy led by Earl Marshal Nottingham to the Council table in Paris. Agreement was reached on a dowry for Isabelle of 800,000 francs but no lands, and on a truce of 28 years. For the first time, a truce was long enough to represent a genuine forswearing of belligerent will—at least on the part of the negotiators. That was the difficulty.
If the French on whose soil the war was fought had, on the whole, had enough, too many English, personified in the Duke of Gloucester, had not. They were galled by a sense of having been bilked out of the gains confirmed in the Treaty of Brétigny. They ached to get satisfaction and saw the marriage putting it off forever. Footloose knights and yeomen were still attracted by the warring way of life and its loot on the continent. The commons, suffering from disrupted commerce and oppressive taxes, may have wanted peace, but they did not like the French marriage. They feared Richard would give away too much to the French; there were mutterings about Calais, and disappointment if not suspicion at the choice of a child queen and continued uncertainty about an heir.
Because of Gloucester’s influence and popularity with the Londoners, Richard did not dare to conclude the alliance without his concurrence and that of his party. More than a year elapsed in the effort to obtain it. The French sent Robert the Hermit to add the weight of Heaven’s command for peace, and to impress upon the English the Turkish menace which the Hermit knew from his travels in Syria. A visionary, even if he traveled with seven horses at the expense of the French King, was not the best choice to influence Gloucester. When, at the climax of his peroration, the Hermit warned, “Surely, whoever is or will be against the peace shall pay dearly for it be he alive or dead,” Gloucester pulled him up with a sharp, “How do you know that?” Robert could only answer by “divine inspiration,” which left the Duke unimpressed. He remained “hard-hearted against the peace,” and by his words “condemned and despised greatly the Frenchmen.”
Richard worriedly told Count Waleran de St. Pol, who had accompanied the Hermit, that Gloucester was trying to influence the people against a peace, perhaps even to “raise the people against me, which is a great peril.” St. Pol, the hard-headed brother of saintly Pierre de Luxemburg, advised the King to win his uncle with fair words and great gifts until the marriage and peace were concluded. Then he could “take other counsel,” because then he would be strong enough to “oppress all rebels, for the French King if need be shall aid you; of this you may be sure.” The lubricator of politics was the same then as before and since. Richard promised Gloucester £100,000 and an earldom for his son worth £2,000 a year (which he later failed to make good) and, by various persuasions and pressures brought to bear by the Duke of Lancaster, secured a sullen acquiescence.
A proxy marriage and ratification of the truce were celebrated in Paris in March 1396, with Nottingham acting as proxy for the King. Nottingham now had occasion to meet the object of his esteem in entertainment if not in combat, for Coucy was one of those who acted as host to the English ambassadors during their three-week stay in the capital. After endorsement of the marriage contract by the barons of England, Richard himself went to Calais in August, where in conferences with the Duke of Burgundy he went far to show himself a friend of France. He agreed to support the Way of Cession and persuade the Pope of Rome to resign, and, more realistically, he agreed to yield English footholds in Brittany. He went home again to make known the articles of peace to his countrymen, for he said he “could not firmly conclude a peace without the general consent of the people of England.”
He returned in October for the climactic meeting with the King of France, held with all appropriate magnificence in a field of bright pavilions on the borders of Calais. Between two lines of 400 French knights and 400 English knights “with their swords in their hands,” the two Kings advanced toward each other, each escorted by the uncles of the other. As they met and embraced, all 800 knights knelt, many weeping with emotion. Meetings, banquets, and merriment followed. The seven-year-old bride, swamped in scarlet velvet and emeralds, was handed over and formally married to Richard in November at Calais by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Enguerrand de Coucy was not present at the ceremonies nor to meet his daughter Philippa, who was in the English party, for he had already departed with the chief knights and nobles of the realm on the last crusade of any consequence in the Middle Ages.
The Kings were at peace, but all the old issues—disputed frontiers and territories, homages and reparations, Guienne and Calais—remained unresolved, and Gloucester’s rancor abided. The French found that all the honors and entertainments and gifts of gold and silver they heaped on him in an effort to soften his antagonism went for nothing. He took the gifts and remained cold, hard, and covert in his answers. “We waste our effort on this Duke of Gloucester,” Burgundy said to his council, “for as long as he lives there shall surely be no peace between France and England. He will always find new inventions and accidents to engender hatred and the strife between the realms.” It did not take Gloucester, who would be dead within a year, to find these. Burgundy himself, through the fratricidal strife with Orléans carried on by his son, was as responsible as any. And the unending war had cut a gulf too deep to be easily pasted over. In England, Richard and Lancaster were the only genuine supporters of a pro-French policy, and both were dead three years after the French marriage. Animosity toward France endured. Not quite twenty years after the reconciliation, Henry V was to call to his followers, “Once more unto the breach!”