Dead, deserted, or captive, the great Christian army was no more. The way to Hungary was open, but the Turks had sustained losses too great to allow them to proceed. In that sense the crusaders had not fought in vain. An attack of gout suffered by Bajazet, which supposedly prevented him from advancing, evoked from Gibbon the proposition that “An acrimonious humor falling on a single fibre of one man may prevent or suspend the misery of nations.” In reality, not gout but the limits of military capacity were the deciding factor. The Sultan turned back to Asia, after first sending Jacques de Helly, on his oath to return, to carry word of the Turkish victory and demand for ransoms to the King of France and Duke of Burgundy.
The ordeal of the prisoners, many of them wounded, on the 350-mile march to Gallipoli was cruel. Stripped of clothing down to their shirts, in most cases without shoes, with hands tied, beaten and brutalized by their escorts, they followed on foot at their captors’ heels over the mountain range and down onto the plain. To nobles equestrian almost from birth, the indignity of the barefoot trek was as great as the physical suffering. At Adrianople the Sultan paused for two weeks. The next stage took the march across the great, empty, treeless plain stretching, as if without horizon, toward the Hellespont. Not a bush nor shelter nor person was to be seen. The sun blazed down by day; when it set, the winds were chill and the October nights cold. In alien hands, uncared for and barely fed, crushed by defeat and fearful of the Sultan’s intentions, the prisoners were in circumstances more dire than they had ever known.
Coucy, eldest of the captives, never before a prisoner nor a loser—in which he was virtually unique for his time—survived only by a miracle, not a metaphoric miracle but one of faith. Clad only in a “little jacket,” with bare legs and the final indignity of no head covering, he was on the point of collapse from cold and exhaustion. Believing himself about to die, he prayed for aid to Notre Dame of Chartres. Though the cathedral was not of his province, the Virgin of Chartres was highly renowned as having been seen in person and known to have performed miracles.
“Suddenly, where there had been no one seen along the road stretching far over flat country, a Bulgarian appeared who was not of a people favorable to us.” The mysterious stranger carried a gown and hat and heavy cloak which he gave to the Sire de Coucy, who put them on and was so restored in spirit by this sign of heavenly favor that he found new vigor to continue the march.
In gratitude, Coucy was to leave 600 gold florins in his last will to Chartres Cathedral, which was duly paid after his death by Geoffrey Maupoivre, a physician who accompanied the crusade, shared the captivity, witnessed the miracle, and served as Coucy’s executor. He recorded the circumstances for the chapter of Chartres in order that they might know the origin of the unexpected gift.
At Gallipoli the nobles among the captives were kept in the upper rooms of the tower, while the 300 common prisoners—the boy Schiltberger among them—who were the Sultan’s share of the booty were held below. The worst of the harsh conditions was deprivation of wine, the Europeans’ daily drink throughout their lives. When the ship bearing Sigismund from Constantinople passed through the Hellespont less than half a mile from shore, the Turks, unable to challenge it at sea, lined up their prisoners at the water’s edge and called mockingly to the King to come out of his boat and deliver his comrades. Sigismund had in fact made overtures from Constantinople to ransom his allies, though they had cost him the war, but his means were depleted and the Sultan knew there was more money to be had from France.
Clinging to Europe’s farthest edge, the prisoners could see the fatal shores of Troy across the straits where the most famous, most foolish, most grievous war of myth or history, the archetype of human bellicosity, had been played out. Nothing mean nor great, sorrowful, heroic nor absurd had been missing from that ten years’ catalogue of woe. Agamemnon had sacrificed a daughter for a wind to fill his sails, Cassandra had warned her city and was not believed, Helen regretted in bitterness her fatal elopement, Achilles, to vent rage for the death of his friend, seven times dragged dead Hector through the dust at his chariot wheels. When the combatants offered each other peace, the gods whispered lies and played tricks until they quarreled and fought again. Troy fell and flames consumed it, and from that prodigious ruin Agamemnon went home to be betrayed and murdered. Since then, through some 2,500 years, how much had changed? The romance of Troy was a favorite of the Middle Ages; Hector was one of the Nine Worthies carved on Coucy’s castle walls. Did he, the Odysseus of this new war, think of that ancient siege and hollow triumph as he gazed across the straits?
After two months at Gallipoli, the prisoners were transferred to Brusa, the Ottoman capital in Asia. Forty miles inland and enclosed by a crescent of mountains, Brusa foreclosed any idea of rescue and removed them even farther from contact with home. Everything depended on ransom. The wait until word could reach and return from France was long and the Sultan’s temper uncertain in the interval. The prisoners feared he might order their deaths at any moment, as easily as they had sent to death the prisoners of Rachowa.
Unbelievable rumors trickled into Paris in the first week of December. That the infidel could have crushed the elite of France and Burgundy seemed unimaginable; nevertheless, anxiety mounted. In the absence of official news, the rumor-mongers were imprisoned in the Châtelet and, if convicted of lying, were to be condemned to death by drowning. The King, the Duke of Burgundy, Louis d’Orléans, and the Duc de Bar each sent separate envoys speeding to Venice and Hungary to learn news of the crusaders, to find them, deliver letters, and bring back replies. On December 16 trading ships brought news into Venice of the disaster at Nicopolis and of Sigismund’s escape, but by Christmas Paris was still without official word.
On Christmas Day, Jacques de Helly “all booted and spurred” entered the Palace of St. Pol, where the court was assembled for the solemn rites of the day, and, kneeling before the King, confirmed the terrible truth of the defeat. He told of the campaign, the climactic battle, the “glorious deaths,” and Bajazet’s hideous revenge. The court listened in consternation. The King and Dukes questioned Helly intently. The letters he brought from Nevers and the other seigneurs were the first news of who was alive and, by omission, who was missing or dead. Weeping relatives crowded around to learn the fate of son or husband or friend. Helly assured his audience that the Sultan would accept ransom, for he “loved gold and riches.” If Froissart may be believed (which he need not always be), the seigneurs present expressed themselves “fortunate to be in a world where there could have been such a battle and to have knowledge of so powerful a heathen King as Amurath-Bequin” (one of the various versions of the name of this distant potentate), who, with all his lineage, “would derive honor from the great adventure.” What signifies is not whether these sentiments were actually expressed, but that they were considered by Froissart the appropriate sentiments for the occasion. At the close of the audience, the rumor-mongers of the Châtelet were released.
The nobility felt “bitter despair,” according to the Monk of St. Denis, and “affliction reigned in all hearts.” Black garments appeared everywhere, and Deschamps wrote of “funerals from morn to eve.” Prayers and tears filled the churches, with sorrow the more intense because the dead had received no Christian burial and the lives of the survivors were feared for. Mourning and lament spread through Burgundy, where so many families suffered a loss. On January 9, a day of solemn services for the dead in the capital and the provinces, “it was piteous to hear the tolling of the bells in all the churches of Paris.” Hardly had the English marriage been celebrated and the burden of the old war lifted at last when rejoicing was stifled, as if God did not wish to allow mankind cause for joy.
The ladies of France sorrowed grievously for their husbands and lovers, “especially,” says Froissart, always concerned for his patron, “the Dame de Coucy, who wept piteously night and day and could take no comfort.” Probably at the suggestion of her brothers, the Duc de Lorraine and Ferry de Lorraine, who came to console and advise her, she wrote on December 31 to the Doge of Venice begging him to aid in arranging the ransom of her husband. Two envoys—Robert d’Esne, a knight of Cambresis with five attendants, and Jacques de Willay, châtelain of St. Gobain, one of the Coucy properties—were dispatched separately, expressly to arrange the deliverance of Coucy and Henri de Bar. They were sent and their expenses paid by Louis d’Orléans, rather than by the Dame de Coucy. With communications no faster than a man could travel, there could be no word for many months.
The problem of arranging ransom was riddled with anxiety because of the unfamiliarity of dealing with a sovereign outside Christendom, of whom only the worst might be expected. On the advice of Jacques de Helly, who reported the Sultan’s exorbitant passion for the accoutrements of the hunt, a convoy of magnificent gifts, especially selected to appeal to him, was assembled to accompany the Duke’s ambassadors. Twelve white gerfalcons, of a rare and costly species of which Gian Galeazzo reportedly sent two to the Sultan every year, were escorted each by its own falconer, together with falconers’ gauntlets embroidered with pearls and precious stones. Ten handsome horses and ten hounds, caparisoned in the arms of Burgundy and conducted by grooms in the Duke’s white-and-scarlet livery, were to make the journey to Turkey, along with saddles of rich work inscribed in “Saracen letters and flowers of overseas,” saddle draperies with buckles in the form of golden roses, fine scarlet cloth of Reims believed unknown in the Orient, and, as a subtle compliment to Bajazet, tapestries of Arras depicting the history of Alexander the Great, from whom he claimed to be directly descended. All this was dispatched with the King’s chamberlain, an experienced diplomat, and three noble ambassadors, officials of Burgundy, who departed on January 20, 1397, to negotiate the ransom. In haste to keep his oath to the Sultan, Jacques de Helly had already hurried on ahead with letters for the prisoners.
Reconciliation with Gian Galeazzo because of his known influence at the Ottoman court had suddenly become all-important. The ambassadors were directed to travel via Milan and convey to Gian Galeazzo, whose first wife had been a princess of France, the King’s belated grant of the right to add the fleur-de-lys to the Visconti escutcheon, and to make every effort to obtain his help. Meanwhile, the first relay of envoys, sent in early December, had reached Venice, where they learned of the defeat and were endeavoring to make their way to the prisoners. Venice, whose interest in maintaining her trade in the Levant made her the link with the Moslem world—and something less than a wholehearted combatant in the crusade—served throughout as the center for news, travel arrangements, cash, and credit.
In Burgundy and Flanders the Duke’s tax-collectors swarmed again. Hardly recovered from financing the crusade, his subjects were now required to salvage the survivors. The traditional aid for the lord’s ransom was demanded from every town and county, plus a contribution from the clergy. The Duke met with bargaining and resistance and had to accept less than he asked for. The sums were not cash but payments to be drawn from revenues extending over months and years. Some were still being levied and disputed three years later. The cry, “Money! Money!”, wrote Deschamps, resounded through his lifetime. Now and again, he says, the commoners, driven to distraction, rise and kill the tax-collectors, then, astonished by their success, collapse again, to be hounded once more by nobles with swords and lawyers with documents, crying in threatening voices, “Sà, de l’argent! Sà, de l’argent!”
In Brusa, Coucy had not fared well. Some accounts say that he fell into a deep chagrin and melancholy which nothing could lighten, that he insisted he would never see France again, that after so many adventures this was destined to be his last. His appraisal was realistic enough, more likely grounded in physical illness from wounds or disease in harsh conditions than in “mourning for the victory of Anti-Christ over the Christians,” as suggested by L’Alouëte, first historian of the Coucy dynasty. At 56, he was not old, even though it is generally considered that old age came early in the Middle Ages. In fact, while a large proportion of the population died early, those who lived into their fifties and sixties were not venerable in body and mind nor considered so. Life-expectancy charts may reflect statistics, but not the way people see themselves. According to an anonymous poem of the mid-14th century, life’s span was 72 years, consisting of twelve ages corresponding to the months of the year. At 18, the youth begins to tremble like March with the approach of spring; at 24, he becomes amorous as the blossoming of April, and nobility and virtue enter his soul along with love; at 36, he is at the summer solstice, his blood as hot as the sun of June; at 42, he has acquired experience; at 48, he should think of harvesting; at 54, he is in the September of life when goods should be stored up; age 60, the October of life, is the onset of old age; 66 is dark November when all green withers and dies and a man should think on death, for his heirs are waiting for him to go if he is poor and waiting more eagerly if he is rich; 72 is December, when life is as mournful as winter and there is nothing left to do but die.
Coucy had led an extraordinarily active life, never at rest, never pausing after one task before undertaking the next. He showed no signs of age or slackening when he undertook the crusade nor when he led the brilliant foray against the Turks on the day before the battle—the only successful French action of the campaign. Then came the disaster in a battle launched against his advice, defeat in an enterprise of which he had been given the guidance, the ghastly spectacle of his comrades and dependents slaughtered before his eyes, the shame and hardships of an ignoble captivity, the remoteness from home, uncertainty of rescue, and fear of a captor not bound by the rules. As one whose life, though anything but soft, had been singularly fortunate, Coucy was not conditioned for so much misfortune. Perhaps he recognized in the Battle of Nicopolis a profound failure of knighthood, and sensed in its outcome a time to die.
On February 16, 1397, preparatory to death, he drew up at Brusa his last will, or, more precisely, a lengthy codicil to a previous will. By this time he may have been removed from prison to better quarters under provisional liberty guaranteed by the rich and noble Francesco Gattilusio, Genoese Lord of Mitylene (Lesbos)—Coucy’s “relative,” according to Froissart. One of the independent lords of the Aegean islands called the Archipelago, Gattilusio was a man of influence at the Ottoman court who, even without kinship, might well have given surety for a great French baron well known in Genoa. The Christian powers of the Archipelago under the shadow of the advancing Turks were acutely affected by the defeat at Nicopolis. The blow to the prestige, not to mention to the arms, of Christianity undermined their position, and the spectacle of prominent Christian nobles imprisoned and perhaps dying in infidel hands was a disturbing one for them. It was in their interest to secure a release, and reports of the prisoners’ misery excited their pity. One merchant of the Archipelago, Nicholas of Aenos, sent a gift of fish, bread, sugar, and linens from his wife in addition to a loan of money. One can only hope that, by courtesy of Gattilusio, Coucy in his last days was not lodged on bare stone.
“Sound of mind but infirm of body, and considering that nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour,” Coucy drew up his lengthy codicil in Latin, probably by the hand of Geoffrey Maupoivre, who was a Master of Arts as well as of Medicine. In the care and precision and nature of these instructions and their reflection of what was on a man’s mind in his last hours, there is no better mirror of the Middle Ages.
“First and above all,” he directs burial in France according to the terms of his previous will (which had specified burial of his body at Nogent and of his heart at his foundation of Ste. Trinité in Soissons). At the very end of the codicil, as if reminded of possible difficulties in embalming and transporting the body to France, he charges his executors with the return of his bones and heart, without fail. At a time when official belief insisted that the body was carrion and the after-life of the soul all that mattered, the extreme concern shown for every detail of disposal of the physical remains was remarkable.
Next in importance was Ste. Trinité, his heaviest investment in salvation. He orders for the monastery “a notable silver cross weighing forty Paris marks [about 23 pounds], a silver censer, two cruets for water and wine for use in the Divine service, a silver ewer for washing the hands of the priest, a fine and notable silver-gilt chalice of fitting weight and workmanship for such a monastery, four pairs of ornaments for the priest, deacon, and sub-deacon, of which three shall be for ordinary use and the fourth for the solemnities of important holy days.”
In the further interest of his soul, bequests follow to no fewer than 21 separate churches and chapels, including Notre Dame de Chartres, “who, as we firmly believe, made for us a visible miracle.” The other bequests range from 100 florins for the chapel of Pierre de Luxemburg at Avignon to 1,000 florins for Notre Dame de Liesse, where Coucyhad escorted Charles VI after his first attack of madness, plus 100 florins each to five separate chantries in Soissons for prayers for his soul, and 6,000 to his executors for further prayers at their discretion. The sum of 1,000 florins was to be distributed among the poor of Paris, the same to the poor of his own domain, and 800 bequeathed to the Hôtel Dieu in Paris.
Unlike many nobles concerned with deathbed restitutions, Coucy evidently had no one he had wronged on his mind, but only some debts to be fulfilled. His only possessions at hand—a gown and a tapestry-are to be sold to pay his servants and to pay Abraham, “apothecary and merchant of Brusa,” for medicines. Debts incurred on the voyage are to be paid by means of jewels he has deposited in Venice. The King of France is asked to hold his lands in France to ensure that revenues will be collected and used for all legacies he has directed. Geoffrey Maupoivre and Jacques d’Amance, Marshal of Lorraine (the duchy of his wife’s family), are named executors, supplemented by Comte d’Eu, Boucicaut, and Guy de Tremoille for aid and counsel. These three together with Guillaume de Tremoille, Jacques de la Marche, and six other French knights witnessed and signed the document.
Two days later, on February 18, 1397, Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy and Count of Soissons, died in Brusa.
A whole man in a fractured time, he was the least compromised of his class and kind by brutality, venality, and reckless indulgence. His fellows have been well described by Clisson’s biographer as “in turn refined and barbaric, generous and bloody, knavish and chivalrous, above mankind in their courage and love of glory, beneath mankind in their hates, their furious follies, their duplicity and savage cruelty.” Coucy was distinct from most in being apparently immune from those furious follies. He saw his role steadily, accepted every responsibility but the constableship, remained sagacious in judgment, cool and capable in performance. In that steadiness, sagacity, and competence, and in commanding the respect and trust of all associates, he had many of the qualities of George Washington, short of leadership, which needs a cause to call it forth. If there have been mute inglorious Miltons in rural villages, presumably there have been unrealized Washingtons born in unpropitious times. The 14th century produced bourgeois leaders like the two Van Arteveldes, Etienne Marcel, Cola di Rienzi, but few from the noble class, partly because leadership was presupposed in the king, who, until the time of Charles V, personally led the nobles into battle. When Jean II was in captivity, the northern French nobles asked Charles of Navarre, because he was a king, to lead them against the Jacques. The nobility, however, had coherence only whenit was threatened as a class. Otherwise, baronial interests were too sectional and habits of independence too strong to allow for a leader, even when the war against the English gradually built up a cause.
Coucy’s English marriage set him apart during twelve crucial years. After his repudiation of England, following the death of his father-in-law, he began to emerge as a leading figure in the Normandy campaign and could have succeeded Du Guesclin as Constable if he had wanted to, but no concept of national leadership attached to that post, no body of public opinion or cohort of colleagues was asking to be led. The moment of what-might-have-been passed with the death of Charles V, and under the self-serving rule of the uncles, national purpose was frittered away. Enguerrand did not innovate nor rise above his time; he went with it, served it better than most, and died of its values. It was reduced by his going. “This Enguerrand VII,” wrote the biographer of Boucicaut, “was esteemed the seigneur of most merit of his time.”
Coucy’s death was not known in Paris for two months. Robert d’Esne and, after him, Jacques de Willay learned of it in Venice on their way east. Still unaware on March 31, Louis d’Orléans in great solicitude sent a clerk of Coucy’s estate to Turkey with clothing, having learned of the prisoners’ impoverished condition. In April, Willay brought back the embalmed heart and body (or bones; whether the actual body was buried in France has been disputed). Only then was the Dame de Coucy notified that her husband was dead. According to the biographer of Boucicaut who tends normally to rhapsodize, she so bewailed her loss “that it seemed that heart and life would leave her, and never more did she wish to marry again, nor allow mourning to depart from her heart.” A funeral of impressive grandeur was conducted by the Bishops of Noyon and Laon, the body (or other remains) being buried in an imposing tomb at Nogent, and the heart at Ste. Trinité, marked by a plaque showing an engraved heart superimposed over the Coucy arms. Deschamps wrote a dirge as if for a national event, lamenting “the end and death of Enguerrand the baron … mourned by every noble heart.”
O St. Lambert, Coucy, La Fère,
Marie, Oisy and St. Gobain,
Weep for your lord, the good seigneur
Who served so well his sovereign
With prowess great in many lands …
Who for the faith in Turkey died.
Let us pray God to pardon him.
In his day bright and beautiful,
Wise, strong, and of great largesse,
A true knight of labor hard
And no repose; in his great house,
He welcomed knights from morn to eve
Who came to join his company.
Preux and bold in Lombardy was he,
He took Arezzo, city of renown,
Made tremble Pavia and Milan.
Let us pray God to pardon him.
Many a heart is sad for him
That none is left to bear his arms.…
The stanzas continue, but, given an erratic meter combined with a rigid chain of only three rhymes winding through 55 lines, the charm of this and other 14th century French poetry is limited, and English, in any case, can do it no justice.
Ransom for the remaining prisoners was finally arranged in June 1397 after prolonged negotiations by the Duke’s ambassadors at the Sultan’s court. The sum was fixed at 200,000 ducats or gold florins, approximately equal in value to French francs. Burgundy’s extravagant gifts misfired, it was said, convincing Bajazet that princes who could command such rare and precious things could pay very highly indeed. All the resources of the banking network were mobilized, chiefly under the direction of Burgundy’s chief purveyor and banker, Dino Rapondi, a native of Tuscany with headquarters in Paris and Bruges. So widespread was his commerce that his name was said to be known wherever there were merchants. Through him, the King and his uncles acquired precious books, silks, furs, tapestries, fine linen shirts and handkerchiefs, amber and unicorn’s horn and other curiosities. Rapondi advised raising the ransom money from the merchants of the Archipelago, who should be written to amiably and promised profit on the loans and credit they could arrange.
Meanwhile, Boucicaut and Guy de Tremoille, released on provisional liberty to seek funds in the Levant, had reached Rhodes, where Tremoille, evidently in weakened condition, fell ill and died at Eastertime. The Knights of Rhodes, anxious like the merchants about Christian prestige, pawned the plate of their Order to raise 30,000 ducats for a down payment on the ransom. The King of Cyprus added 15,000, and various merchants and wealthy citizens of the Archipelago made loans amounting to 30,000. Sigismund had grandly offered to subscribe half the ransom, but as he was perennially short of money, the best he could do was assign 7,000 ducats of revenues owed him by Venice. More than half the total was underwritten on behalf of Burgundy by Gattilusio, Seigneur of Mitylene.
On a down payment of 75,000, the prisoners were released on June 24 on their promise to remain in Venice until the entire sum was paid. One more of their number did not regain liberty. By a cruel justice, Comte d’Eu died on June 15, nine days before the release. Bajazet’s farewell to the others was not courtly. Addressing Jean de Nevers, he said he disdained to ask him for an oath not to take up arms against him in the future. “Raise what power thou wilt and spare not, but come against me. Thou shalt find me ever ready to receive thee and thy company in the field in plain battle … for I am ready to do deeds of arms and ever ready to conquer further into Christendom.” The Sultan then required the departing crusaders to witness the spectacle of his hunt conducted by 7,000 falconers and 6,000 huntsmen with hounds in satin blankets and leopards in diamond collars.
Weakened in health and even more in resources, the crusaders made no haste to regain France, or even Venice. To travel in indigence was unthinkable for a Prince of Burgundy. He and his companions stopped off at Mitylene, Rhodes, and other islands to rest and recover and borrow money wherever they could. The lady of Mitylene gave them all new shirts, gowns, and apparel of fine damask, “every man according to his degree.” The Knights of Rhodes entertained them for a month. In Venice, which they did not reach until October, the financial transactions involving all parties connected with the crusade were intricate and tremendous. Through loans and guarantees, enough was collected to make up the ransom but not enough to go home in style.
Repayment of debts amounting to 100,000 ducats which they had incurred for living and traveling expenses since their release, together with the cost of the journey home in appropriate splendor, required nearly again as much as the ransom. The Duke and Duchess of Burgundy did not wish their son to travel through Europe and make his appearance in France looking like a fugitive. The Duke scraped every resource, to the point of reducing the pay and pensions of Burgundian officials, to supply his son with a magnificent retinue and provide gifts for all concerned. Dino Rapondi came to Venice with an order on the Duke’s treasury for 150,000 francs and spent the winter arranging transfers of funds, of which repayment to the merchants of the Archipelago came last. Three years later the Seigneur of Mitylene was still owed the entire sum he had loaned, and a three-cornered transaction among Burgundy, Sigismund, and the Republic of Venice was not settled for twenty-seven years. These difficulties did not inhibit the Duke’s style of living. In 1399 he bought from Dino Rapondi two illuminated books for 6,500 francs and, in the next year, two more for 9,000 and 7,500 apiece.
An outbreak of plague in Venice while the crusaders were there caused them to remove to Treviso on the mainland, but took nevertheless the life of one more—Henri de Bar. If the epidemic was the Black Death, it had come full circle in Coucy’s family, taking first his mother and now his son-in-law. It was a sad death so close to home, and in leaving Marie, who was the primary heir, both fatherless and a widow, it was to have a sad effect on the Coucy domain, so long coveted by the royal house.
The crusaders, of whom only Nevers, Boucicaut, Guillaume de Tremoille, and Jacques de la Marche were left among the leaders, along with some seven or eight other lords and knights, re-entered France in February 1398. They were received at the gates of Dijon with acclamation and gifts of silver presented by the municipality. In memory of his own captivity, Nevers liberated from the city prison, “by his own hand,” all whom he found there. Dijon held solemn services for the dead crusaders, but thereafter the welcome was all celebration and joy.
In Paris the King gave his cousin a well-considered gift of 20,000 livres. The towns of Burgundy and Flanders vied for the honor of receiving him. On orders of his father, he made a triumphal progress to exhibit himself to the people whose taxes had bought his return. Minstrels preceded him through the gates, fetes and parades greeted him, more gifts of silver and of wine and fish were presented. Considering all the bereaved families of Burgundy whose sons did not return, the receptions probably represented not so much popular enthusiasm as organized joy, in which the 14th century excelled. Celebration was required for the prestige of the Duke and his heir, and the towns were happy enough to cooperate in expectation of the favors that generally accompanied such joyous occasions. The magistrates of Tournai expected Nevers’ ceremonial entry to be graced by a plenary pardon, in which they were disappointed.
In pomp and minstrelsy, the culminating fiasco of knighthood was interred. After Nicopolis, nothing went right for France for many long years. The presiding values of chivalry did not change, but the system was in its decadence. Froissart found this in England too, where a friend of former times said to him, “Where are the great enterprises and valiant men, the glorious battles and conquests? Where are the knights in England who could do such deeds now?… The times are changed for the worse.… Now felonies and hates are nourished here.”
The celebrations for Nevers could not conceal the defeat, and the moralists found in it reinforcement for pessimism. Mézières immediately composed an Epistre Lamentable et Consolatoire, Deschamps a ballade “For the French Fallen at Nicopolis,” Bonet an allegorical satire in the form of an “Apparition of Master Jean de Meung,” who appears in a dream to reproach the author for not protesting the evils that are destroying France and Christendom. Deschamps states openly that Nicopolis was lost “through pride and folly,” although he lays some blame upon the Hungarians “who fled.” Mézières similarly has hard words for the “schismatics,” who, “for the great hate they bear the Latins,” preferred to be subjects of the Sultan rather than of the King of Hungary. But essentially he sees the defeat as the consequence of the crusaders’ lack of the four moral virtues necessary to any army: order, discipline, obedience, and justice. In the absence of these, God departs from an army, which then becomes easily discomfited, and this accounts for all the discomfitures since Crécy and Poitiers. Mézières’ call for a new crusade aroused no response. The Epistre Lamentable was his last work. Eight years later his scolding and his passion were finally stilled in death. Like any Isaiah, he grew tiresome, but his yearning for goodness in society spoke for all the silent people who yearned for it too but left no record.
Bonet, while including the usual censure of knights for their soft life and love of capons and ducks, white shirts and fine wines, comes to something more basic. The knights leave the peasants behind because they think them “worth nothing,” he writes, although the poor can endure hardship and coarse food, and, if armed, would wage a good fight, like the Portuguese peasants who fought bravely and killed many knights at Aljubarrota. (The reference is to a battle of 1385 in the same year and with similar results as the Swiss Battle of Sempach.) While Bonet and others had often in the past condemned the warrior for robbery and cruelty toward peasants, they were now ready to condemn chivalry’s fundamental assumption that military capacity resided in none but the mounted knight. The chronicler of the Quatre Valois, writing at about this time, pointed out that the common soldier had been decisive in certain combats “and for this, poor men should not be held without honor nor in vile esteem.” He cited a battle of the King of Cyprus against the Saracens in 1367, in which the day was saved by action of the sailors who remained to guard the ships, and this was by the will of Christ, who did not wish Christian chivalry to perish at the hands of the infidels, and moreover “wished to give an example to nobles.… For our Lord Jesus Christ wants no grandiloquence or vanity. He wishes victory to be gained by the common people so that the great should not take vainglory.”
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.
The Turkish victory had no immediate effect in Europe because Bajazet had to turn east against the rise of a fierce enemy in Asia. The rapid conquests of Tamerlane at the head of a revived Mongol-Turkic horde were comparable, in Gibbon’s large words, “to the primitive convulsions of nature which agitated and altered the surface of the globe.” Overrunning Anatolia, leaving a trail of ruined cities and pyramids of skulls, Tamerlane met and defeated the Ottoman army at Angora (Ankara) in 1402 and captured the Sultan alive. Kept in a wagon fitted with iron bars, Bajazet was dragged along on the Mongol path of conquest until he died of misery and shame—as if history had deliberately arranged a symmetrical retribution.
Absorbed in its own factions and schisms, Europe failed to seize the occasion to break the Ottoman hold on the Balkans. Except for a brave but minor expedition led by Boucicaut—the last trickle of the crusades—Constantinople could obtain no more help from the West; Sigismund was embroiled with the Germans and Bohemia; France and England were each torn by domestic conflict. Bajazet’s son held his own against Tamerlane, the Mongol eruption subsided, Bajazet’s grandson advanced again in Europe, and in 1453 his great-grandson Mohammed II conquered Constantinople.
At Coucy, rival ambitions swirled around the great barony with its castles of grandeur, its 150 towns and villages, its famous forests, its “many fine ponds, many good vassals,… much great nobility and inestimable revenues.” Marie de Bar, Coucy’s eldest daughter, and the Dame de Coucy, his widow, entered into a prolonged contest over the inheritance, Marie claiming the whole and the Dame de Coucy claiming half. Neither ceding, they lived in hostility, each in a separate castle of the domain with her captains and entourage of relatives, each pursuing lawsuits. At the same time the Célestins of Ste. Trinité brought a lawsuit against the widow, claiming that she had failed to carry out Coucy’s last bequests to their monastery.
Meanwhile, Queen Isabeau, still concerned primarily with her parental family, was trying to promote a marriage between her father, Stephen of Bavaria, then in Paris as ambassador of the Empire, and the Dame de Coucy. This raised the prospect of the strategic domain passing into foreign hands, for it was feared that Marie might be pressured into allowing the house of Bavaria to take possession by purchase or otherwise. To frustrate this design, Louis d’Orléans pressured Marie (by “threats and menaces,” according to one source) into selling the barony to him, disregarding the widow’s claims on the ground that the barony was indivisible. Whether his motive was primarily the interests of France or his personal aggrandizement vis-à-vis the Duke of Burgundy is an open question. In any event, he acquired one of the greatest properties of northern France, which gave him a wedge between his uncle’s two territories of Burgundy and Flanders. To confirm the patriotic motive, Marie was persuaded to state in the deed of sale, concluded November 15, 1400, that she “cannot put or transfer [the property] more securely for the good of the Kingdom of France than in the person of Monseigneur the Duc d’Orléans.”
The purchase price was 400,000 livres, of which Louis paid only 60,000 down. Marie retained the usufruct of the domain and the use of the castles of La Fère and Du Châtelet for her residence, but legal disputes continued after the sale. By some means or other she was compelled to acquit Louis of 200,000 livres, or half the price, while the balance of 140,000 on the other half remained unpaid. No less than eleven lawsuits were brought by Marie against Orléans in an attempt to recover, before she died suddenly after a wedding feast in 1405, not without “a suspicion of poison.” Her son Robert de Bar continued the litigation, both as plaintiff against Orléans and as defendant against the Dame de Coucy, who had not, after all, married Stephen of Bavaria and was still maintaining her dower rights in the courts. In 1408, after the death of Louis d’Orléans, Parlement allowed the widow’s claim, but this lapsed a few years later when her daughter Isabel, who had married the brother of Jean de Nevers, died without an heir. Meanwhile Charles d’Orléans, Louis’ son, remained in possession, and when Charles’s son became King as Louis XII, the barony of Coucy passed, where it had long been desired, to the crown.
The tormented century sank to a close in keeping with its character. In March 1398 the Emperor Wenceslas and the King of France met at Reims in a renewed effort to end the schism of which they represented opposite sides. Charles VI had been persuaded that he would never recover from his affliction until the Church was re-united. To unseat Benedict, the University of Paris had proposed that France withdraw obedience, but before adopting this radical measure, one more attempt to obtain mutual abdication by the popes was to be tried. The assent of the Empire to exert pressure on Boniface was required, and this was the purpose of the assembly at Reims. Owing to the disabilities of the two major sovereigns, one incapacitated by alcohol and the other by insanity, the result was not what it might have been. Renewed madness was already darkening Charles’s mind when he arrived and in the brief intervals when he was lucid, Wenceslas was drunk. The Emperor entered the negotiations in a stupor which he maintained by steady consumption while vaguely agreeing to anything that was proposed. When reason entirely deserted Charles, the assembly dispersed.
Persuasions and threats of force were brought to bear on both popes, and resisted. France resorted to withdrawal of obedience and even to a siege of the papal palace with Pope Benedict inside, but neither of these measures succeeded in effectively deposing him, and the first caused so much trouble that it had to be rescinded. Richard II, intent on friendship with France, agreed to demand the abdication of Boniface, which only succeeded in violently antagonizing the English, already disaffected by the King’s misgovernment. The citizens of London, partisans of Gloucester, would now call the King nothing but Richard of Bordeaux (his birthplace) and were greatly excited against him, saying, “His heart is so French that he cannot hide it, but a day will come to pay for all.”
Then happened in England those “great and horrible” events, the like of which, Froissart felt, had not been seen in all the history he had recorded. Convinced of plots against him, Richard removed Gloucester to Calais, where he was strangled with a towel, executed Arundel, banished Warwick and the Percys, and so aroused the fears and hates of his subjects that in 1399 his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke was able to depose him without a sword being raised in the rightful King’s defense. Compelled publicly to resign the crown, Richard was transferred from the Tower to a more secluded prison, where, within a year, he died of purposeful neglect, or worse. The prop of peaceful relations with France was removed. Bolingbroke (now Henry IV) talked boldly of abrogating the truce, but usurpation breeds rebellion and he was too occupied in maintaining his throne to look for trouble abroad.
With these events, Froissart lost heart. If the sale of Guy de Blois’ property had damaged his ideals, the deposition of the King of England shocked him profoundly, not for any love of Richard II, but because the act was subversive of the whole order that sustained his world. The sixty-odd years of his—and Coucy’s—lifetime, which had seemed to him a pageant of unending interest and excitement, were closing in shadow. He glimpsed hollowness and could not continue; his history breaks off as the century ends.
If the sixty years seemed full of brilliance and adventure to a few at the top, to most they were a succession of wayward dangers; of the three galloping evils, pillage, plague, and taxes; of fierce and tragic conflicts, bizarre fates, capricious money, sorcery, betrayals, insurrections, murder, madness, and the downfall of princes; of dwindling labor for the fields, of cleared land reverting to waste; and always the recurring black shadow of pestilence carrying its message of guilt and sin and the hostility of God.
Mankind was not improved by the message. Consciousness of wickedness made behavior worse. Violence threw off restraints. It was a time of default. Rules crumbled, institutions failed in their functions. Knighthood did not protect; the Church, more worldly than spiritual, did not guide the way to God; the towns, once agents of progress and the commonweal, were absorbed in mutual hostilities and divided by class war; the population, depleted by the Black Death, did not recover. The war of England and France and the brigandage it spawned revealed the emptiness of chivalry’s military pretensions and the falsity of its moral ones. The schism shook the foundations of the central institution, spreading a deep and pervasive uneasiness. People felt subject to events beyond their control, swept, like flotsam at sea, hither and yon in a universe without reason or purpose. They lived through a period which suffered and struggled without visible advance. They longed for a remedy, for a revival of faith, for stability and order that never came.
The times were not static. Loss of confidence in the guarantors of order opened the way to demands for change, and miseria gave force to the impulse. The oppressed were no longer enduring but rebelling, although, like the bourgeois who tried to compel reform, they were inadequate, unready, and unequipped for the task. Marcel could not impose good government, neither could the Good Parliament. The Jacques could not overthrow the nobles, the popolo minuto of Florence could not advance their status, the English peasants were betrayed by their King; every working-class insurrection was crushed.
Yet change, as always, was taking place. Wyclif and the protestant movement were the natural consequence of default by the Church. Monarchy, centralized government, the national state gained in strength, whether for good or bad. Seaborne enterprise, liberated by the compass, was reaching toward the voyages of discovery that were to burst the confines of Europe and find the New World. Literature from Dante to Chaucer was expressing itself in national languages, ready for the great leap forward in print. In the year that Enguerrand de Coucy died, Johan Gutenberg was born, although that in itself marked no turn of the tide. The ills and disorders of the 14th century could not be without consequence. Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.