A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  It took two visits and Coucy’s most reasoned and eloquent arguments and tactful hints of the weakness of Montfort’s position—for in fact he had little support among his own subjects—to accomplish his object. After first persuading Montfort to give up Clisson’s castles, he was sent back to get full restitution of the money and, most difficult of all, to push, wheedle, and drag the Duke to judgment in Paris. Desperately wanting to avoid Clisson, Montfort advanced a thousand excuses, but with added pressure from Burgundy, now anxious for a settlement, he was overborne. Against his alleged fear of assassination, Coucy persuaded him to go as far as Blois, where the King’s uncles would meet him. With a safe-conduct from the King, reinforced by his own escort of 1,200 men, Montfort ventured up the Loire in a flotilla of six ships and, in June 1388, ultimately arrived at the gates of the Louvre in Paris. Restitution of Clisson’s property and a formal pardon by the King were sealed by the usual formula of reconciliation in which the Duke and the Constable swore to be “good and loyal” sovereign and vassal respectively and, glaring at each other, drank from the same cup in token of “love and peace.”

  From the King, in token of royal appreciation, Coucy received a French Bible, and from history, through Froissart, a more memorable tribute. “And I knew four lords who were the best entertainers of others of all that I knew: they were the Duke of Brabant, the Count of Foix, the Count of Savoy, and especially the Lord of Coucy; for he was the most gracious and persuasive lord in all Christendom … the most well-versed in all customs. That was the repute he bore among all lords and ladies in France, England, Germany, and Lombardy and in all places where he was known, for in his time he had traveled much and seen much of the world, and also he was naturally inclined to be polite.”

  With these talents Coucy had brought to heel the most troublesome vassal since Charles of Navarre.

  * By a fluke of survival, the domestic accounts of Coucy-le-Château for the year 1386–87 remained in existence long enough for a local antiquarian, Lucien Broche, to publish a report of them in 1905–09. The originals disappeared during the First World War, in which Picardy suffered great destruction.

  Chapter 21

  The Fiction Cracks

  The double collapse of the French invasion of England and, on the English side, the successive fiascos of the Buckingham and Norwich raids revealed the hollowness of knightly pretensions. Adding to the indignity, Austrian knights were slaughtered in 1385 by Swiss commoners at Sempach in a battle that reversed the verdict of Roosebeke.

  The Austrians, expecting to duplicate the French massacre of “miscreants” of the non-warrior class, had dismounted to fight on foot as the French had in Flanders. But the Swiss had been trained in flexibility and rapid movement, just the opposite of the impacted line that had caused the Flemings’ defeat. When the tide turned against the Austrians, their mounted reserves fled from the field without engaging, as Orléans’ battalion had fled at Poitiers. Out of 900 in the Austrian vanguard, almost 700 corpses, including Duke Leopold’s, lay on the field at the end.

  What knights lacked in the fading 14th century was innovation. Holding to traditional forms, they gave little thought or professional study to tactics. When everyone of noble estate was a fighter by function, professionalism was not greater but less.

  Chivalry was not aware of its decadence, or if it was, clung ever more passionately to outward forms and brilliant rites to convince itself that the fiction was still the reality. Outside observers, however, had grown increasingly critical as the fiction grew increasingly implausible. It was now fifty years since the start of the war with England, and fifty years of damaging war could not fail to diminish the prestige of a warrior class that could neither win nor make peace but only pile further injury and misery upon the people.

  Deschamps openly mocked the adventure in Scotland in a long ballad with the refrain, “You are not now on the Grand Pont in Paris.”

  You who are arrayed like bridegrooms,

  You who talk so well when you are in France

  Of the great deeds you will do,

  You go to conquer what you have lost:

  What is it? Renown that for so long

  Honored your country.

  If you seek to recover it in battle,

  Display your hearts, not your fancy clothes.…

  You are not now on the Grand Pont in Paris.

  Mézières, too, writing his Songe du Vieil Pélérin in 1388, did not restrain his scorn as Honoré Bonet had not restrained his reproaches. Because the knights had won a victory “by the hand of God at Roosebeke against a crowd of fullers and weavers, they take on vainglory and think themselves the peers of their ancestors, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godefrey of Bouillon. Of all the rules of war written by Assyrians, Jews, Romans, Greeks, and all Christians, this French chivalry does not keep one tenth, yet thinks there is no chivalry in the world of valor equal to theirs.”

  The nobles’ fashionable clothes and habits of luxury, their private bedrooms where they shut themselves up till noon, their soft beds and perfumed baths and comforts on campaign were cited as evidence that knighthood had gone soft. The ancient Romans, as Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University, remarked sarcastically some years later, “did not drag after them three or four pack horses and wagons laden with robes, jewels, carpets, boots and hose and double tents. They did not carry with them iron or brass stoves to make little pies.”

  More than soft beds and foppery, the moral failure of chivalry spread dismay. Instead of troubadours glorifying the ideal knight and ideal love in romantic epics, moralists now deplored in satire and allegory and didactic treatise what the knight had become—predator and aggressor rather than champion of justice. Chansons de gestes were no longer composed in the second half of the century, although, since the lusty fabliaux disappeared at the same time, the cause cannot be said to have been failure of the ideal so much as some mysterious failing of the literary spirit. The vices and follies and strange disorders of the time demanded moralizing, yet, ironically, it is Froissart’s celebration of chivalry in its own image that endures.

  In Italy, the complaint had a different source: knighthood was detached from nobility. “A few years ago,” lamented Franco Sacchetti at the end of the century, “bakers, wool-carders, usurers, money-changers, and blackguards became knights. Why does an official need knighthood when he goes to preside over some provincial town?… How art thou sunken, unhappy dignity! Of all the long list of knightly duties, what single one do these knights of ours discharge? I wish to speak of these things that the reader might see that knighthood is dead.”

  If Sacchetti’s tone was morose, it was widely shared. With the courts of France and England ruled by minors and prey to factions, with the new Emperor Wenceslas proving a drunkard and a brute, with the Church split between two popes, each as remote from holiness as it was possible to be, no brilliance of the ruling class could cover its tarnish. Coucy was right in his perception of diminishing prestige, even if his suggested remedy was only to make matters worse.

  The Guelders campaign of September–October 1388 proved that snafu was a military condition long before the word was coined. The expedition was mobilized on a scale out of all proportion to its petty issue or possible gain. Because of his relationships in Bar and Lorraine, which lay on the way, and his knowledge of the terrrain, Coucy was designated to recruit the lords of the area and plan the campaign. The preferable route lay through Brabant, but the towns and nobles of that duchy warned that they would never allow passage of a French army because it would cause more damage to their lands “than if the enemy were in the country.”

  A decision was perforce taken to march straight through the dark, forbidding forest of the Ardennes, where, Froissart remarks with awed inaccuracy, “no traveler had ever before passed.” This necessitated sending surveyors to find a way through, followed by a force of 2,500 men to cut a road, an engineering task hardly less challenging than the portable town. The cost was paid for by a triple tax
on salt and sales, for a purpose difficult to represent as defense of the realm. Perhaps for that reason, Coucy had been required to recruit in his own name as if for another expedition against the Hapsburgs, rather than in the name of the King.

  Led by Coucy, a vanguard of 1,000 lances began the march, followed by the King and main body with “12,000” baggage carts, not counting pack animals. While en route, Coucy was suddenly detached for a mission to Avignon of unrecorded purpose but probably concerned with the plan that continued to obsess the French of conquering Rome for Clement. He returned—“to the great joy of the whole army”—within about a month, which, considering a journey of almost 500 miles each way, was energetic traveling.

  Little combat and no glory were found at Guelders. The campaign bogged down in negotiations. Tents were wet after a summer of heavy rains, provisions rotted in the humidity, food was scarce despite a rich country. The return after honor had been satisfied by a negotiated apology from the Duke of Guelders, was wretched under more heavy rains. Roads were mud, horses stumbled over slippery logs and rocks, men were drowned in fording flooded rivers, and wagons of booty floated away. Knights, squires, and grand seigneurs came home without pride or profit, many of them sick or exhausted and blaming the Duke of Burgundy whose ambitions in Brabant they correctly held responsible. Coucy seems to have incurred no blame as he had incurred none in the insurrection of Paris. Since the start of the reign, the government of the uncles had dragged the country into ruinous expense for a series of grandiose projects ending in futility. At Guelders their credit ran out.

  Awareness of bad government speaks through the omens and incidents inserted in the record by a censorious chronicler like the Monk of St. Denis. While the army for Guelders was being assembled, he reports, a hermit journeyed all the way from Provence to tell the King and his uncles that he had been instructed by an angel to warn them to treat their subjects more gently and lessen the burden of taxes and subsidies. The nobles at court scorned the hermit for his poverty and were deaf to his counsel, and though the young King treated him kindly and was disposed to listen, the uncles sent him away and levied the triple tax.

  Deschamps’ satire grew more caustic after the Guelders campaign, in which he had personally participated and fallen ill like others of an “intestinal flux.” The military do not find their best friend in a war correspondent suffering from dysentery. Through many ballads, Deschamps’ theme is unfavorable comparison with knights of the past. They had gained hardiness through long apprenticeship and training, ridden long journeys, practiced wrestling and throwing the stone, scaling forts, and combat with shield and sword. Now the younger men scorn training and call those who wish to instruct them cowards. They spend their youth eating and drinking, spending and borrowing, “polishing themselves white as ivory … each one a paladin.” They sleep late between white sheets, call for wine on waking, eat partridges and fat capons, comb their hair to perfection, know nothing about the management of estates, and care for nothing but making money. They are arrogant, irreligious, weakened by gluttony and debauchery, and unfit for the profession of arms, “the heaviest in the world.”

  Denouncing them on the one hand for softness and indolence, Deschamps castigates them on the other for recklessness, improvidence, and bad judgment. In his Lay de Vaillance, they keep no order, no night watch or scouts or advance guard, give no protection to foragers, allow carts and provisions to be captured. “When bread lacked for a day or it rained in the morning, they cried, ‘The army will starve!’ ” and “when they let provisions spoil on the ground, they wanted to turn back.” They start out in winter, attack recklessly and in the wrong season, never ask the advice of the older men until after danger threatens, complain loudly when in trouble, and open themselves to defeat. “Because of mad recklessness, such armies are to be despised.”

  Deschamps is a scold but not an advocate of fundamental change or infusion of new blood into the nobility. He is bourgeois in sympathy, deplores injustice to the peasant, and writes ballads in praise of rural Robin and Margot for their love of France, but he denounces peasants who attempt to become squires and remove themselves from labor on the land. “Such rogues should be brought to justice and made to keep their class.”

  All of society is found corrupt in Mézières’ Dream of the Old Pilgrim. Like Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman, it is an allegorical guidebook to the troubles of the age and, in addition, a plea for “reformation of all the world, all Christianity and especially the Kingdom of France.” The pilgrim Ardent Desire and his sister Good Hope journey through the world to test the fitness of mankind for the return of the Queen of Truth and her attendants Peace, Mercy, and Justice, long absent from the earth. Mézières’ message was urgent, his sense of wrongdoing profound, his prognosis somber.

  As if in response, Charles VI at age twenty dismissed his uncles and assumed full sovereignty himself immediately upon returning from Guelders in 1388. The Cardinal of Laon, ranking prelate, proposed the motion at a meeting of the Council. A few days later he fell ill and died, “delivered from the fury and hate of the uncles of the King,” and widely believed to have been poisoned by them.

  Clisson later boasted to an English envoy that it was he who had made Charles VI “king and lord of his realm and put the government out of the hands of his uncles.” Apart from Clisson’s personal enmity, Coucy and others in the Council at the time were anxious to lift from the crown and themselves the further burden of the Dukes’ unpopularity. The person most closely concerned, however, was the King’s younger, cleverer, more dynamic brother and, for the time being, heir apparent, Louis, Duc de Touraine, soon to be known by his more familiar title, Duc d’Orléans.

  Beginning in 1389, Louis of Orléans replaced the Duke of Burgundy in the Royal Council and for the rest of his brief, eventful life, already nearly half over, was to play a major role in French affairs, with a particular link to Coucy. A handsome pleasure-seeker and “devoted servant of Venus” who enjoyed the company of “dancers, flatterers, and people of loose life,” he was also devoutly religious and used to retreat for two or three days at a time to the Celestine monastery, whose quarters in Paris (on the present Quai des Célestins) had been established by his father in 1363. A penitential order favored too by Philippe de Mézières, who had been the royal princes’ tutor, the Celestins observed extreme rules of abstinence designed to promote concentration on eternity and disappearance of the body. Louis was much influenced by Mézières, whom he named his executor. He had evidently learned more from him than had his brother, for he was said to be the only member of the royal family who could understand diplomatic Latin. Something of a scholar for one of his station, he was also a compulsive gambler at chess and tennis as well as dice and cards. He played with his butler, his cup-bearer, and his carver, and at tennis with fellow nobles lost sums up to 2,000 gold francs.

  Louis was as rapacious and ambitious for power as the uncles whom he ousted to make way for his ambition. The feud he thereby started was to end nineteen years later in his murder by his cousin Jean, son and successor of the Duke of Burgundy, tear France and Burgundy apart, and re-open the way to the English. Toward the end of his life he adopted a device of strange significance, the camal, a clerical hood or knight’s mantle, which was said at the time to represent Ca-mal or Combien de mal, meaning how much evil is done in these days. Born to the century’s last generation, Louis, for all his indulgences in pleasure, saw his world somberly. A verse of the time describes him as

  Sorrowing, even sad, yet beautiful;

  He seemed too melancholy for one

  Whose heart was hard as steel.

  Coucy, though clearly associated with the ousting of the Dukes, nevertheless entertained Philip the Bold and his son the Count of Nevers immediately afterward. The Duke’s accounts show that he and his son dined and slept at the castle on December 8 “at the expense of Monseigneur de Coucy,” and that during the visit he presented a diamond ring to the Dame de Coucy and a brooch of sa
pphires and pearls to her baby daughter. Coucy was always worth cultivating.

  The reorganized Council made a serious effort to end the Dukes’ personal autocracy and restore the administrative system of Charles V. The Marmosets—Rivière, Mercier, and others—regained authority, bureaucracy was purged of the uncles’ men, five commissioners of reform were appointed to seek out the worst abuses, remove corrupt officials, and replace them by “good men.” As a step toward reconciliation with the bourgeois of Paris, the office of Provost of Paris and some, though not all, former municipal offices and privileges were restored. Measures were taken, or at least formulated, to improve sewage collection and restrict professional beggars, whose crutches and eye-patches and gruesome sores and stumps were stripped off each night in the district known by virtue of the transformations that took place there, as the Cour des Miracles.

  The central problem of financing government was recognized in a series of ordinances dealing with financial and judicial reforms. Cancellation of the University’s tax-exemption was one measure attempted by Rivière and Mercier with no good result, for it earned them the powerful enmity of the University to add to that of the Dukes.