A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  With a small body of knights and mixed Picard-Breton-Norman men-at-arms, Coucy entered Alsace in imperial territory in September 1369. At about this time Isabella returned to England with her daughters, either to protect her revenues or because her mother was dying at Windsor, or both. The death of good Queen Philippa in August 1369 had historic effect in that it turned Froissart back to France and French patrons—of whom Coucy was to be one—and to a French point of view in the unfolding chronicle.

  In Alsace, Coucy had contracted with the Count of Montbéliard, at a price of 21,000 francs, for his aid against the Hapsburg Dukes. In a manifesto to the towns of Strasbourg and Colmar, he disclaimed any hostile intention against them and stated the case of his inheritance. Thereafter, as the evidence dims, it is clear only that the project aborted. Some say that the Dukes of Austria recruited a powerful enemy of Montbéliard to immobilize his forces, others that Coucy was recalled by an urgent message from Charles V on September 30 requiring his service in the war against England. Forced to a decision, he was evidently able to make an acceptable case for his neutrality to the King, for at that point he vanishes, and for the next two years, except for a single reference, his history is blank.

  The single reference places him in Prague, from where he dated a legal document of January 14, 1370, endowing an annuity of 40 marks sterling drawn from his English revenues on his senseschal, the Chanoine de Robersart. A journey to Prague would have been a natural effort to enlist the Emperor’s influence upon the Hapsburgs in behalf of his inheritance. Froissart was later to say that Coucy had “oftentimes” complained of his rights to the Emperor, who acknowledged their justice but professed inability to “constrain them of Austria, for they were strong in his country with many good men of war.”

  After a documentary hiatus of 22 months, the next piece of evidence places Coucy in Savoy, where from November 1371 he was actively engaged with his cousin the Green Count against that nobleman’s inexhaustible supply of antagonists. In 1372–73 both together fought in Italy in the service of the Pope against the Visconti.

  Since the fall of the Roman Empire, power had moved out of Italy, leaving political chaos in a land of cultural wealth. Italy’s cities throve in art and commerce, her agriculture developed greater skills than elsewhere, her bankers accumulated capital and a monopoly of finance in Europe, but the incessant strife of factions and the rending struggle for control between papacy and empire, Guelf and Ghibelline, brought Italy to the age of despots out of a craving for order. City-states, once the parents of republican autonomy, succumbed to Can Grandes, Malatestas, Visconti, who ruled by no title but force. Servile to tyrants—except for Venice, which kept its independent oligarchy, and Florence its Signoria—Italy was compared by Dante to both a slave and a brothel. No people talked more about unity and nationhood, and had less, than the Italians.

  Partly as a result of these conditions foreign condottieri found a ready foothold in Italy. Bound by no loyalties, serving for gain rather than fealty, they nourished wars for their own benefit and protracted them as long as they could, while the hapless population suffered the effects. Merchants and pilgrims had to engage armed escorts. City gates were shut at night. The prior of a monastery near Siena moved all his possessions two or three times a year into the walled town “for fear of these companies.” A merchant of Florence, passing by a mountain village taken over by brigands, was set upon and though he cried aloud for help and the whole village heard him, no one dared come to his aid.

  Yet even when roads are lawless and assault is normal, ordinary life has the same persistence as the growth of weeds. The great maritime republics of Venice and Genoa still brought to Europe the cargoes of the East, the Italian network of banking and credit still buzzed with invisible business, the weavers of Florence, the armorers of Milan, the glassblowers of Venice, the artisans of Tuscany still pursued their crafts under red-tiled roofs.

  In mid-14th century the central political fact of Italy was the desperate effort of the Avignon papacy to maintain control of its temporal base in the Papal States. To govern this great band of middle Italy from outside the country was in fact impossible. The cost of the attempt was a series of ferocious wars, blood and massacre, oppressive taxation, alien and hated governors, and steadily increasing hostility to the papacy within its homeland.

  Inevitably the effort to reconquer the Papal States collided with the expansion of Milan under the Visconti who had seized Bologna, a papal fief, in 1350 and threatened to become the dominant power of Italy. When the papal forces succeeded in regaining Bologna, Bernabò Visconti in an epic rage forced a priest to pronounce anathema upon the Pope from the top of a tower. Rejecting papal authority altogether, he seized ecclesiastical property, forced the Archbishop of Milan to kneel to him, forbade his subjects to pay tithes, seek pardons, or have any other dealings with the Curia, refused to accept papal appointees to benefices in his domain, tore up and trampled on papal missives. When he ignored a summons to Avignon to be sentenced for debaucheries, cruelties, and “diabolic hatred” of the Church, Urban V excommunicated him as a heretic in 1363 and, in one of the century’s more futile gestures, preached crusade against him. Hostile to the Avignon papacy for its worldliness, rapacity, and its very existence in the French orbit, Italians regarded Urban as no better than a French tool, and paid no attention to his call.

  Born Guillaume de Grimoard of a noble family of Languedoc, Urban was a sincerely devout man, a former Benedictine monk, who genuinely desired to restore the credibility of the Church and revive papal prestige. He reduced multiple benefices, raised the educational standards for priests, took stern measures against usury, simony, and clerical concubinage, forbade the wearing of pointed shoes in the Curia, and did not endear himself to the College of Cardinals. He had not been one of them but a mere Abbot of St. Victor’s in Marseille when elected. His elevation over higher-ranking candidates, including the ambitious Talleyrand de Périgord, had been owed only to the inability of the cardinals to agree on one of themselves, but the public thought this astonishing departure outside their own group must have been inspired by God. According to Petrarch, pursuing his favorite theme, only the Divine Spirit could have caused such men as the cardinals to suppress their own jealousies and ambitions and open the way for elevation of a Pope who would return the papacy to Rome.

  This Urban intended to do as soon as he should have firm control over the patrimony of St. Peter. Among the devout everywhere, the yearning for return to Rome was an expression of their yearning for a purifying of the Church. If the Pope shared that sentiment, he also recognized that return was the only means of controlling the temporal base, and he understood the necessity of terminating what the rest of Europe saw as French vassalage. It was clear that the longer the papacy remained in Avignon, the weaker became its authority and the less its prestige in Italy and England. Over the violent objections of the cardinals, and the resistance of the King of France, Urban was determined upon return.

  In Italy, Bernabò was not the only enemy of priests. Francesco Ordelaffi, despot of Forlì, responded to excommunication by causing straw-stuffed images of the cardinals to be burned in the market place. Even Florence, though allied on and off with the papacy out of need to resist Milan, was anti-clerical and anti-papal in spirit. The Florentine chronicler Franco Sacchetti excused Ordelaffi’s vicious mutilation of a priest on the ground that he had not acted from the sin of avarice and that it would be a good thing for society if all priests were treated in the same way.

  In England they had a saying, “The Pope has become French and Jesus English.” The English were increasingly resentful of the papal appointment of foreigners to English benefices, with its accompanying drain of English money outside the country. In their growing spirit of independence, they were already moving toward a Church of England without being aware of it.

  In April 1367 Urban carried out the great removal, sailing from Marseille over the wailing of the cardinals, who are reported to have shrieked al
oud, “Oh, wicked Pope! Oh, Godless brother! Whither is he dragging his sons?” as if he were taking them into exile instead of out of it. Reluctant to leave the luxuries of Avignon for the insecurity and decay of Rome, only five of the college in the first instance accompanied him. The greater part of the huge administrative structure was left at Avignon.

  Urban’s first landfall was at Leghorn, where Giovanni Agnello, the Doge of Pisa, an “odious and overbearing” ruler, came to meet him escorted by Sir John Hawkwood and 1,000 of his men-at-arms in their glittering mail. At the sight, the Pope trembled and refused to disembark. It was not a propitious omen for return to the Eternal City.

  The malign spirit of the 14th century ruled over the return. Only when he had assembled a temporal army and an imposing escort of Italian nobles was the Holy Father able to enter the capital city of Christendom, now sadly disheveled. Dependent formerly on the immense business of the papal court, Rome had no thriving commerce like that of Florence or Venice to fall back on. In the absence of the papacy it had sunk into poverty and chronic disorder; the population dwindled from over 50,000 before the Black Death to 20,000; classical monuments, tumbled by earthquake or neglect, were vandalized for their stones; cattle were stabled in abandoned churches, streets were pitted with stagnant pools and strewn with rubbish. Rome had no poets like Dante and Petrarch, no “invincible doctor” like Ockham, no university like Paris and Bologna, no flourishing studios of painting and sculpture. It did harbor one notable holy figure, Brigitta of Sweden, who was kind and meek to every creature, but a passionate denouncer of the corruption of the hierarchy.

  For a moment in 1368, the arrival of the Emperor in Lombardy to make common cause with the Pope against the Visconti seemed to augur well. But little came of his effort, and the feuds and rivalries resumed. In 1369 the ancient goal of reunion with the Eastern Church seemed almost at hand when the Byzantine Emperor, John V Paleologus, came to Rome to meet Urban in a magnificent ceremony at St. Peter’s. He hoped to obtain Western help against the Turks in return for rejoining the Roman Church, but this project too fell apart when the churches could not agree on ritual.

  Harassed by renewed revolt in the Papal States, threatened by a massing of Bernabò’s troops in Tuscany, defeated and disillusioned, Urban crept back to Avignon in September 1370. In deserted Rome, Brigitta of Sweden predicted his early death for betraying the Mother of Churches. Within two months he died, like King Jean of an unspecified illness. Perhaps its name was despair.

  In electing a successor, the cardinals thought to play safe with a thorough Frenchman of great baronial family, the former Cardinal Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who took title as Pope Gregory XI. He was a pious and modest priest of 41, bothered by some debilitating ailment from which he “endured much pain,” who, it was believed, would have no spirit for the perils of Rome. Though a nephew of the superb Clement VI, who had made him a cardinal at age nineteen, Gregory did not have his uncle’s lordly ways, nor his prestige, nor any particularly visible strength of character. The cardinals had overlooked, however, the sometimes transforming effect of supreme office.

  As soon as he was enthroned, Gregory, like his predecessor, felt the force of the call to Rome, both in the cries of the religious and in the political necessity of leaving Avignon and returning the papacy to its home base. Reluctant and indecisive by nature, he might have preferred a quiet life, but as Supreme Pontiff he felt a sense of mission. He could not move to Italy, however, until the Papal States were made safe against the Visconti. For this purpose Urban had organized a Papal League of various powers to declare war upon Milan, which Gregory now inherited. In 1371 when Bernabò seized further fiefs of the Holy See, the need for action was compelling.

  In the same year, Amadeus of Savoy, the Green Count, entered Piedmont, where his territory adjoined Milan, in pursuit of a local war against one of his vassals. He was accompanied by his cousin Enguerrand de Coucy, whom he appointed his Lieutenant-General for Piedmont.

  Enguerrand crossed the snowbound Alps with a company of 100 lances some time between November and March in the winter of 1371–72. Though impassable in the 20th century in winter, the alpine passes were negotiated in all seasons by medieval travelers, with the aid of Savoyard mountaineers as guides. People of the Middle Ages were less deterred by physical hazards than their more comfortable descendants. Monks of the local hospices and local villagers, exempted from taxes for their service, kept paths marked and strung ropes along the ridges. They guided parties of loaded mules and pulled travelers on the ramasse, a rough mattress made of boughs with ends tied together by a rope. Travelers wore snow goggles or hats and hoods cut like masks over their faces. A cardinal’s party with a train of 120 horses was seen crossing in one November with the horses’ eyelids closed by the freezing snow. The bodies of travelers overcome by storm, or who had failed to reach a hospice by nightfall, were regularly cleared away by the guides in spring.

  From their trans-alpine perch, the Counts of Savoy exercised control of the passes with great effect. The Green Count, Amadeus VI, was a strong-willed enterprising prince whose father and Coucy’s maternal grandmother had been brother and sister. Seventeenth of his dynasty, brother-in-law of the Queen of France, founder of two orders of chivalry, leader of the crusade which had expelled the Turks from Gallipoli in 1365 and restored the Emperor of Byzantium to his throne, Amadeus despised mercenaries as “scoundrels” and “nobodies”—and hired them nonetheless. On occasion he was not above bribing them to betray their previous contracts. For operations in Piedmont against the Marquis of Saluzzo in 1371, he engaged the dreaded and brutal Anachino Baumgarten with his German-Hungarian company of 1,200 lances, 600 briganti, and 300 archers. In the face of this threat, Saluzzo turned for support to Bernabò Visconti, who sent him reinforcements.

  At this point Coucy entered Piedmont as leader of the Savoyard campaign. Clearly well schooled in standard practice, Coucy is reported “wasting” Saluzzo’s territory and sending to Amadeus for more men so as to strip the country more effectively. These tactics, designed to induce surrender, rapidly succeeded. Coucy’s conquest of three towns and siege of a fourth provoked a counter-offensive by Bernabò in behalf of his ally. In reaction Amadeus joined the Papal League against the Visconti, to the extreme distress of his sister Blanche, who was married to Galeazzo Visconti. In recognition of the 1,000 lances Amadeus promised to engage at his own expense, the Pope named him Captain-General of the league forces in western Lombardy.

  In the ensuing struggle, the parties were entangled in a web of relationships more important to themselves than to posterity. Connected by marriage or vassalage or treaty in one way or another, the belligerents shifted in and out of alliances and enmities like chess pieces playing a gigantic game, which may account for the strangely insubstantial nature of the fighting. The war was further conditioned by the use of mercenaries, who, having no loyalties at all, shifted overnight even more easily than their principals. The lord of Mantua started as a member of the league and abandoned the Pope to join Bernabò. Sir John Hawkwood, starting in the pay of Bernabò, abandoned him to join the league. The Marquis of Montferrat, heavily besieged by Galeazzo, subsequently married his daughter, the widowed Violante. Amadeus and Galeazzo, reluctant enemies linked by common devotion to Blanche, felt more threatened by Bernabò than by each other, and ultimately came to a private understanding. The war that engaged Enguerrand de Coucy in Lombardy for the next two years was a snake pit of wriggling fragments.

  At Asti, focus of the Savoyard campaign, Coucy found himself in August 1372 facing Sir John Hawkwood’s White Company, then in the pay of the Visconti. Each of Hawkwood’s men, as described by Villani, was served by one or two pages who kept his armor bright so that it “shone like a mirror and thus gave them a more terrifying appearance.” In combat their horses were held by the pages while the men-at-arms fought on foot in a compact round body with each lance, pointed low, held by two men. “With slow steps and terrible outcry, they advanced upon the ene
my and very difficult it was to break or disunite them.” However, Villani adds, they did better at night raids on villages than in open combat, and when successful “it was more owing to the cowardice of our own men” than to the company’s valor or moral virtue.

  Troubled by gout and having no taste anyway for personal combat, Galeazzo had sent his 21-year-old son in nominal command of the siege of Asti. Called the Count of Vertu from the title acquired by his childhood marriage to Isabelle of France, Gian Galeazzo was tall and well built with the reddish hair and striking good looks of his father, though his intellectual rather than his physical qualities were what impressed most observers. The only son of devoted parents, educated in statecraft but untried in war, the young Visconti, himself the father of three, was accompanied by two guardians under orders from his father and mother to keep him from being killed or captured, which, they noted, “are frequent events in war.” All too dutifully the guardians prevented Hawkwood from the frontal assault he wanted to make, causing him, in exasperation, to strike his tents and leave the camp. In consequence, the Savoyards were able to relieve the city. When Bernabò halved Hawkwood’s pay in penalty, he deserted to the papal forces. Shortly afterward Baumgarten, the Savoyard mercenary, deserted to the Visconti.