A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  For the Savoyards, the relief of Asti, if something less than a brilliant military victory, opened the way for the march on Milan. Gian Galeazzo, returning without glory from his first essay in arms, came back to Pavia in time to be present at the death of his 23-year-old wife, Isabelle of France. She died in the birth of their fourth child, a son who survived her only seven months.

  Enguerrand’s role at Asti, though not chronicled, must have been prominent and possibly decisive in some way, for the Pope immediately empowered his legate, the Cardinal of St. Eustache, “to contract and make treaties, alliances and agreements with Enguerrand, Lord of Coucy, on behalf of the Church,” with the object of giving him command of papal troops which the Cardinal was conducting to Lombardy. A first payment to Coucy of 5,893 florins was authorized through a banker of Florence, “to be received by hand,” on condition that if Coucy failed to carry out strictly the terms of his agreement with the Cardinal, he must reimburse the papal treasury by 6,000 florins.

  At 20 florins per lance per month, the usual mercenary rate, the sum indicates that the force assigned to Coucy numbered 300 lances, rather than the 1,000 originally promised by the Pope. Three hundred lances was a normal-size company in the contracts of the time, which ranged from 60 or 70 to 1,000 lances, of three mounted men each, plus mounted archers, foot soldiers, and servants.

  In December the Pope formally appointed Coucy Captain-General of the papal company operating in Lombardy against the “sons of damnation.” The appointment reflected Gregory’s impatience with Amadeus, who had undertaken to advance on Milan from the west, but was still in Piedmont, defending his own territory against Visconti forces. Coucy’s mission was to join Hawkwood, now in papal employ, who had retired to Bologna after changing sides, and was already marching westward again toward the hoped-for envelopment of Milan. Coucy was to proceed with him toward a junction with Amadeus which would complete the envelopment.

  In February 1373 Amadeus at last entered Milanese territory, having reached a pact of neutrality with Galeazzo. The hand of his sister Blanche was clearly active in ending the unhappy family situation in which her husband’s lands were being ravaged by her brother. In their agreement Amadeus promised not to molest Galeazzo’s territory, in return for Galeazzo’s promise not to give aid to Bernabò against him. Galeazzo thus took himself halfway out of the war, leaving Amadeus free to proceed against Bernabò without fear of attack on his rear.

  By January 1373 Coucy had joined Hawkwood somewhere east of Parma, from which they continued to move toward Milan. On February 26, just as they were approaching their goal, the Pope in an astonishing about-face instructed Coucy to provide a safe-conduct to the Visconti brothers to appear in Avignon before the end of March.

  Gregory had been taken in by an offer of the Visconti to negotiate, which was merely Bernabò’s device for gaining time to assemble his forces. While still rejoicing in his enemies’ anticipated submission, Gregory wrote to commend Coucy for acting “bravely and forcefully to foster the interests of the Church in Italy,” and to thank him for that uncommon commodity, his “undivided loyalty.” Two days later, discovering himself deceived by the Visconti, the Pope expressed his pain and astonishment that Coucy had “entertained peace proposals from the enemies of the Church.” He was ordered to listen to no further propositions of this kind, but to carry out his mission in the assurance that the Pope was resolved “never to negotiate.” In letters to all concerned, Gregory beseeched more energetic action to effect the junction.

  Coucy and Hawkwood, after crossing the Po in April, reached the hill town of Montichiari about forty miles east of Milan. By this time Amadeus had circled Milan to the north and after a long pause, supposedly caused by agents of Bernabò poisoning his provisions, had proceeded to a point no more than fifty miles distant from Coucy and Hawkwood. Here he came to a stop, evidently to prepare a defensive position against the advance of 1,000 lances under Bernabò’s son-in-law, the Duke of Bavaria, who was said to be approaching.

  Between the two arms of the papal forces, Bernabò had constructed dikes on the river Oglio which could be opened to flood the plain and prevent the enemy’s passage. He had called for reinforcements from Galeazzo to block the threatened envelopment and “requite in good earnest” the Sire de Coucy and Giovanni Acuto, as the Italians called Hawkwood. While precluded from fighting his brother-in-law of Savoy, Galeazzo considered himself free to act against the other arm of the enemy, that is, against Coucy and Hawkwood. He sent his son at the head of a combined force of Lombards and Baumgarten’s mercenaries, numbering altogether more than 1,000 lances plus archers and many foot soldiers. Gian Galeazzo, who was kept informed of the enemy’s strength and route by the lord of Mantua, advanced confidently in the knowledge of numerical superiority.

  At Montichiari the Coucy-Hawkwood force numbered 600 lances and 700 archers besides some hastily assembled provisionati or peasant infantry. Seeing himself vastly outnumbered, Coucy is said to have handed the baton of command to Hawkwood on the grounds of his greater experience and knowledge of Italian warfare, but the course of events supports a contrary version—that he himself launched the attack with the furia francesca for which his countrymen were known. As the forces clashed, men-at-arms “tangled so heavily against one another that it was a marvel to behold.” Beaten back with heavy losses, Coucy would have been overcome but for Hawkwood, who, according to Froissart, “came to his aid with five hundred because the lord of Coucy had wedded the kynge of England’s daughter and for none other cause.” Though taking heavy punishment, they managed to retreat to the hilltop while Visconti’s mercenaries, believing victory won, broke apart in the customary rampage of looting. Men of the companies always presented a problem of control. Gian Galeazzo was inexperienced and Baumgarten was either complacent or not present in person. He is not mentioned in accounts of the battle.

  Seizing their chance, Coucy and Hawkwood regrouped their battered numbers and charged down upon Gian Galeazzo. Unhorsed, with lance beaten from his hand and helmet from his head, he was saved only by the valiant fighting of his Milanese men-at-arms, who covered his escape from the field but were themselves overcome before the mercenaries could be reassembled. In an upset as astonishing in miniature as Poitiers, the inferior papal force triumphed and bore from the field the Visconti banners and 200 prisoners including thirty high-ranking Lombard nobles good for rich ransoms. The Pope pronounced the victory a miracle, and its report, traveling swiftly to France, endowed Coucy with sudden fame. In the small world of his time, fame was easily won; more important was what he learned. Coucy never again indulged himself in that reckless attack for which French knighthood as a whole had so great an affinity.

  Militarily, Montichiari had little impact. It led to no junction with Savoy because the Coucy-Hawkwood force, bloodied and depleted, judged it rash to try to break through, and withdrew instead to Bologna, to the great distress of the Pope. He kept pleading for the junction with Savoy to crush Bernabò, that “Son of Belial.” He promised Hawkwood that delayed payments would soon be made, and covered Coucy with compliments on his “loyal and careful good judgment, remarkable honesty and well-known prudence.” Recognizing “by the test of experience your great decisiveness and foresight,” the Pope renewed Coucy’s commission as Captain-General in June. Hawkwood, whose company was the mainstay of the force, was not one to give action without pay, and his unpaid men were growing rebellious. Passing through Mantua, they inflicted such injury and thievery upon the citizens as caused the lord of Mantua to complain to the Pope, who in turn begged Coucy to restrain the “forces of the Church” from committing further damage. The danger if not the irony of using brigands to restore papal authority was becoming apparent.

  By a brave fight through a narrow pass, the Count of Savoy broke out of his position and was able to advance and join Coucy and Hawkwood at Bologna, from where, all together, they marched westward again in July. Again at Modena the mercenaries aroused the fury of the citizens, which the P
ope almost tearfully begged Coucy to appease, especially as Modena belonged to the Papal League. Reaching Piacenza in August 1373, the papal forces laid siege to the city, but the effort petered out when Amadeus fell ill. From that point, under heavy rains flooding rivers, assaults by Bernabò’s troops, and general lack of enthusiasm, the offensive disintegrated.

  As captain of a force now thoroughly disorganized and compromised, Coucy saw little future in the papal war. On the grounds of long absence from his wife and children and his estate, and the need to care for his affairs in his own war-torn country, he applied for leave to return to France. Gregory graciously granted the release on January 23, 1374, with further fulsome tributes to Coucy’s loyalty, devotion, decisiveness, “great honesty,” and other virtues “with which you have been endowed by the Almighty.” Considering that Coucy was abandoning the cause, the excess of flattery may have been meant to cover an absence of cash, for the money due him was not paid by the papal treasury until many years later.

  His departure may have been given added impetus by the recurrence of the Black Death in Italy and southern France in 1373–74. Under its influence, Gregory’s war effort dwindled away. Discouraged by illness, Amadeus concluded a separate peace with Galeazzo and abandoned the Pope once his own interests in Piedmont were preserved. Galeazzo on his part, fearing that Bernabò’s policies would lead to destruction, was equally ready to separate from his brother. Bernabò was said to have been so enraged by the reconciliation with Savoy that he attempted to assassinate his sister-in-law Blanche as its agent. Forced to make peace with the Pope for the time being, he secured favorable terms in a treaty of June 1374 by bribing papal councillors. Nothing had been accomplished by either side in the war because no combatant but the Pope—who could not make his will effective—had fought for anything fundamental, and war is too unpleasant and costly a business to be sustained successfully without a cause.

  For Gian Galeazzo his second discomfiture was enough. He never again took command of troops in battle. A skillful statesman who was to bring the Visconti empire to the peak of its power, Gian Galeazzo remained a melancholy man, oppressed perhaps by the inability to govern without trickery and violence, and saddened by family tragedies. After the loss of his wife and infant son, his eldest son died at the age of ten and his second son at thirteen, leaving him with an adored only daughter who was not to escape an unhappy fate.

  With the third advent of the plague, contagion was more strictly controlled if no better understood. While it raged in Milan, Bernabò ordered every victim to be taken out of the city and left to die or recover in the fields. Any person who nursed a plague patient was to be strictly quarantined for ten days; priests were to examine their parishioners for symptoms and report to a special commission under pain of death for failure; anyone who brought the disease into the city was subject to the death penalty and confiscation of property. Venice denied entry to all ships suspected of carrying infection, but with the flea and rat not yet implicated, the precautions, though groping in the right direction, failed to stop the carrier. At Piacenza, where Coucy’s war effort ended, half the population died, and at Pisa, where the plague lasted two years, it was said to have wiped out four fifths of the children. The most famous death of 1374 was Petrarch’s at age seventy, not of plague but peacefully in a chair with his head and arms resting on a pile of books. His old friend Boccaccio, soured and ill, followed a year later.

  In the Rhineland, unconnected with the plague, a new hysteria appeared in the form of a dancing mania. Whether it sprang from misery and homelessness caused by heavy spring floods of the Rhine that year, or whether it was the spontaneous symptom of a disturbed time, history does not know, but the participants were in no doubt. They were convinced that they were possessed by demons. Forming circles in streets and churches, they danced for hours with leaps and screams, calling on demons by name to cease tormenting them or crying that they saw visions of Christ or the Virgin or the heavens opening. When exhausted they fell to the ground rolling and groaning as if in the grip of agonies. As the mania spread to Holland and Flanders, the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair and moved in groups from place to place like the flagellants. They were chiefly the poor—peasants, artisans, servants, and beggars, with a large proportion of women, especially the unmarried. Sexual revels often followed the dancing, but the dominant preoccupation was exorcism of devils. In the agony of the times, people felt a demonic presence, and in their minds nothing pointed more surely to. Satan’s handiwork in society than the fashion for wearing pointed shoes, which they had so often heard denounced in sermons. Something slightly insane about this crippling frivolity made it in the common mind the mark of the Devil.

  Hostility to the clergy marked the dancers as it had the flagellants. In their anxiety to suppress a craze which menaced them, priests performed as many exorcisms as they could while the public watched, sharing in the presence of demons. Processions and masses were held to pray for the sufferers. The frenzy died out within a year, although it was to reappear on and off over the next two centuries. Whatever its cause, it testified to a growing submission to the supernatural, of which the Pope took notice. In August 1374 he announced the right of the Inquisition to intervene in trials for sorcery, heretofore considered a civil crime. Because sorcery was made to work by the aid of demons, Gregory claimed it lay within Church jurisdiction.

  On his return home, Coucy found his native country gaining the advantage in the war for the first time in thirty years. France now had a King who, if no captain, was a purposeful leader with a definite war aim—recovery of the ceded territories. During Coucy’s absence in Italy, England had lost most of these territories, and her three greatest soldiers as well: Sir John Chandos, the Captal de Buch, and the Black Prince. Had Coucy been present and active during this period of his country’s recovery, instead of neutralized by his English marriage, he might well have taken the primary role that went to Du Guesclin. As it was, Charles V, whose constant effort was to win support of the great territorial barons on whom he had to depend, made a special attempt to re-attach him. The title of Sire de Coucy, according to a saying of the time, was held in the general estimation “as high as that of King or prince.”

  On Enguerrand’s return, he was summoned directly to the King, who feasted him and asked for all the news of the papal war. From Paris Enguerrand went home to rejoin his wife, “and if they had a great meeting together there was reason enough,” assumed Froissart, “for they had not seen each other for a great while.” Marital reunion was followed by a notable honor offered to Coucy when in November 1374 Charles V appointed him Marshal of France, sending a knight under the royal banner to bring him the insignia of office. Still constrained by his double allegiance, Coucy felt obliged to decline the baton. The King nevertheless assigned him an annual pension of 6,000 francs on August 4, 1374, of which he received a first payment of 1,000 francs in November.

  Far from clouding his name, Coucy’s departure from France rather than take part in the war, and his steadfast neutrality thereafter, were considered the epitome of honor on both sides, and served him well by protecting his estates from English attack. During Knollys’ raid through Picardy of 1370, “the land of the lord of Coucy abode in peace, nor was there any man or woman of it that had any hurt the value of a penny if they said they belonged to the lord of Coucy.” If they were robbed before their identity was made known, they were paid back by double the amount. A French knight, the Chevalier de Chin, took rather unchivalric advantage of this known immunity by carrying a banner bearing the Coucy arms into a furious scrimmage in Picardy in 1373. He caused great marvel among the English at the sight of his banner, for they said, “How is it that the Lord Coucy hath sent men hither to be against us when he ought to be our friend?” Yet such was the confidence in his honor that they did not believe the banner and forbore to take reprisals against his land “nor burn nor do any damage there.”

  Charles’s planned strategy was avoidance of majo
r battle while exerting scattered military action at every vulnerable point, with as much pressure as possible concentrated on Aquitaine. To recover Castile as an ally, he sent Du Guesclin back to Spain in 1369 with spectacular result. In a “marvelous grete and ferse batayle” near Toledo the two half-brothers Don Enrique and King Pedro fought with awful ax strokes hand to hand, “each cryinge theyre cryes,” until Pedro was overcome and captured. Froissart always prefers the noble version, but, according to a Spanish and possibly better-informed chronicler, the capture was effected less honorably. Surrounded and trapped in a castle, Pedro conveyed an offer to Du Guesclin of six fiefs and 200,000 gold dobles if he would convey him to safety. Feigning acceptance, Bertrand led the King out secretly and promptly turned him over to Enrique. Confronted by his brother, Pedro “set his hand on his knife and would have slayne him without remedy,” had not an alert French knight seized him by the leg and turned him upside down, whereupon Enrique killed him with a plunge of his dagger, and recovered the crown.

  For France the result was the invaluable addition of Castilian sea power, and for England a renewed fear of invasion that cramped her effort overseas. Thereafter one mischance after another befell the English cause. The Black Prince was invalided by a contagious dysentery that spread among the English and Gascons and, in his case, gave way by a cruel irony to dropsy. With swollen limbs, he was “weighed down by so great infirmity of body that he could scarcely sit upon his horse,” and as he grew heavier and weaker could not mount and was confined to bed. For the paragon of battle, the man of action and incomparable pride, to be incapacitated at 38 by a humiliating disease was maddening, the more so when the situation he commanded was deteriorating. The Prince fell into rage and ill-temper. Before these came to a tragic climax, the next mischance arose.