A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  As “a man of approved honor, valor, chivalry and great renown, as is known in many honorable places,” Coucy was challenged by Nottingham to name a day and place for a joust of three points of the lance, three of the sword, three of the dagger, and three blows of the ax on foot. He was to send, sealed with his seal, “a good and loyal safe-conduct” from his King, and if Calais were chosen as the site, Nottingham would in turn supply a safe-conduct from his King. He suggested that the combat take place in front of “as many persons as you and I shall be prepared to supply with safe-conduct and lodging.” No record exists of a reply or of any such joust taking place. Coucy was either uninterested or unwilling to engage while the truce was still pending.

  Foiled of glory, Nottingham took up the famous challenge of St. Ingelbert in the following year when the dashing Boucicaut and two companions, angered by English boasting after the truce, offered to hold the lists against all comers in any form of combat for thirty days. Prudent counsel advised against re-opening a quarrel so soon after the truce for the whims of “wild young knights,” and friends advised the three that it would be beyond their powers. Boucicaut was not one to be moved by prudence. At sixteen he had fought his first battle at Roosebeke where a huge Fleming, mocking his youth and small size, told him to go back to his mother’s arms. Drawing his dagger, Boucicaut had plunged it into the man’s side with the words, “Do the children of your country play games like these?” He and his companions maintained the lists of St. Ingelbert with great courage and he went on to become Marshal of France and share in Coucy’s last adventure.

  Nottingham’s craving for combat was to have a darker conclusion. Ten years later it led him as Duke of Norfolk to the historic duel with Bolingbroke which was to precipitate the downfall of Richard II. Banished together with his opponent at the time of the duel, Nottingham was to die in exile within a year.

  Moving from place to place, visiting, investigating, asking questions, Jean Froissart came to Paris in the month when the truce was signed to visit “the gentil Sire de Coucy … one of my seigneurs and patrons.” In the twenty years since the death of his first patron, Queen Philippa of England, Froissart had enjoyed some support from the Emperor Wenceslas and had obtained a clerical living through the patronage of Guy de Châtillon, Count of Blois, with no duties but to continue his history. When Guy de Blois went bankrupt, Coucy had proposed Froissart for a canonry of Lille which had so far not materialized. Meantime,

  The good seigneur de Couci

  Often stuffed my fist

  With [a bag of] red-sealed florins.*

  While the recipient of patronage is likely in turn to be generous with compliments, Froissart’s for Coucy seem more than merely conventional; they add up to a distinct individual. “Gentil” was a word routinely applied to any important and well-considered noble, meaning no more than that he or she was nobly born; Coucy, in addition, is “subtle,” “prudent,” and especially “imaginatif” or “fort-imaginatif,” meaning intelligent, thoughtful, or far-seeing, and the all-inclusive “sage” or “très-sage,” which could mean wise, sensible, wary, rational, discreet, judicious, cool, sober, staid, well-behaved, steady, virtuous, or presumably any or all of these. He is also described as “cointe,” meaning elegant in manner and dress, gracious, courteous, valiant—a compendium of the attributes of chivalry.

  Book One of Froissart’s Chronicles, in which chivalry immediately recognized a celebrator, had appeared in 1370, at once creating a wide demand. The oldest extant manuscript copy of Book One, now in the Royal Library of Belgium, bears the Coucy coat-of-arms.

  Multiple copying of manuscripts was no longer the monopoly of lonely monks in their cells but the occupation of professional scribes who had their own guilds. Licensed in Paris by the University, supposedly to ensure accurate texts, the scribes were the agony of living authors, who complained bitterly of the copyists’ delays and errors. The “trouble and discouragement” a writer suffers, wailed Petrarch, was indescribable. Such was the “ignorance, laziness, and arrogance of these fellows” that when a writer has given them his work, he never knows what changes he will find in it when he gets it back.

  The rise of a bourgeois audience in the 14th century and the increased manufacture of paper created a reading public wider than the nobles who had known literature from recitation or reading aloud in their castle halls. The mercantile class, familiar by reason of its occupation with reading and writing, was ready to read books of all sorts: verse, history, romance, travel, bawdy tales, allegories, and religious works. Possession of books had become the mark of a cultivated man. Since the magnates and newly rich imitated the manners, ideals, and dress of the nobility, the chronicles of chivalry had a great vogue.

  What books Enguerrand VII may have owned in addition to Froissart’s Chronicles are not known except for those listed in the royal archives as gifts to him from the King. In addition to the French Bible from Genesis to Psalms, which he was given for his services in subduing the Duke of Brittany, he received in 1390 the romance of King Peppin and His Wife Bertha Bigfoot and the rhymed Gestes de Charlemagne, “well-inscribed on three columns to the page in a very large volume,” which had belonged to the Queen and which “the King took from her and gave to Monsieur de Coucy.”

  Froissart arrived in Paris from the south, where he had visited another patron, the Count of Foix, and had been received by the Pope in Avignon. He had also attended the wedding of the Duc de Berry to a twelve-year-old bride, the occasion of much ribald comment. Eager for first-hand reports of these affairs, Coucy invited Froissart to accompany him on a journey to his fief at Mortagne. Riding together, they exchanged news, Coucy telling the chronicler what he knew of the truce parleys, and Froissart full of tales about his effulgent host at Foix. It appeared that the Count of Foix, who had the wardship of Berry’s bride, had taken cool advantage of the Duke’s ardor; he had strung out the marriage negotiations until Berry, in his impatience, agreed to pay 30,000 francs to cover the maiden’s expenses while she had been Foix’s ward.

  In the course of persistent questioning, Froissart had drawn from the Count of Foix a contemporary view of the 14th century, seen from a position of privilege. The history of his own lifetime, Gaston Phoebus said, would be more sought after than any other because “in these fifty years there have been more feats of arms and more marvels in the world than in 300 years before.” To him the ferment of the times was exciting; he had no misgivings. In the midst of events there is no perspective.

  No misgivings about knighthood played a part in a frenzied celebration of that dignity on the occasion of the knighting of twelve-year-old Louis II of Anjou and his younger brother aged ten. In the ceremony’s four days of all-too secular festivities staged in the royal Abbey of St. Denis, 14th century France relived the decadence of Rome, and indeed the knighting of little boys was not so far removed from the emperor who made a Consul of his horse. The surpassing pomp of the occasion and the selection of St. Denis as the site were intended to promote enthusiasm for the Angevin recovery of the Kingdom of Naples. Radical alterations were made in the abbey’s precincts to accommodate tournaments, dances, and banquets. Religious services gave way to the hammering of carpenters and the coming and going of laborers and their materials. At the ceremony, after ritual baths and prayers, the two princelings, robed in floor-length furred mantles of double red silk, were escorted to the altar by squires holding naked swords by their points with golden spurs hanging from the hilts. In his enthusiasm for chivalric forms, Charles VI resurrected antique rituals which had fallen into disuse in his father’s time and were already so faded that spectators “thought it all strange and extraordinary” and inquired what the rites signified.

  The same nostalgia was enacted in the next day’s tournament, when knights in polished armor were conducted to the lists by noble ladies “to imitate the gallantry of ancient worthies.” Each of the ladies in turn drew from her bosom a ribbon of colored silk to bestow graciously upon her knight. After each da
y’s jousts and tourneys, the celebrants “turned night into day” with dances, masquerades, feasting, drunkenness, and, according to the indignant Monk of St. Denis, “libertinage and adultery.” Knighthood, represented by the two half-forgotten little principals, was not noticeably enhanced.

  Government expenditure continued to mount through the year 1389 to an excess as extravagant as the uncles’, although its purpose was civil rather than military. Its climax was the ceremonial entry into Paris of Isabeau of Bavaria, for her coronation as Queen, an event of spectacular splendor and unparalleled marvels of public entertainment. Though its cost contradicted the good intentions of the new government, the performance was in itself a form of government in the same sense as a Roman circus. What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few? Circuses and ceremonies are meant to encourage the acceptance; they either succeed or, by costing too much, accomplish the opposite.

  Some of the Queen’s thunder was stolen by Valentina Visconti, the new wife of Louis d’Orléans, who arrived just in time for the occasion. Since her marriage by proxy to Louis in 1387, the two intervening years had been required by her father, Gian Galeazzo, to amass her unprecedented dowry of half a million gold francs, plus Asti and other territories of Piedmont. Valentina was his only remaining child, to whom he was so attached that he left Pavia rather than be present at her departure, “and this was because he could not take leave of her without bursting into tears.” As the daughter of his dead wife, Isabelle of France—and thus Louis of Orléans’ first cousin—Valentina had grown up in a household which her father had made “a harbor for the famous, for men skilled in all learning and art whom he held in high honor.” She spoke Latin, French, and German fluently, and brought her own books and harp with her to France. Thirteen hundred knights escorted her across the Alps, her trousseau may be extrapolated from a robe embroidered with 2,500 pearls and sprinkled with diamonds, her future household with Louis was carpeted in Aragon leather and hung with vermilion velvet embroidered with roses and crossbows. The household accounts show silk sheets costing 400 francs as New Year’s gifts, but all the luxuries could not keep melancholy from pervading the marriage.

  On the great day of the Queen’s entry, the procession advanced along the Rue St. Denis, the main boulevard leading to the Châtelet and to the Grand Pont over the Seine. It was a ladies’ day, with the duchesses and great ladies riding in richly ornamented litters escorted on either side by noble lords. Coucy escorted his daughter Marie and her mother-in-law, the Duchess of Bar, while his wife rode in another litter. The robes and jewels of the ladies were masterpieces of the embroiderers’ and goldsmiths’ arts, for the King wanted every previous ceremonial to be outdone. He had ordered the archives of St. Denis consulted for details of the coronations of ancient queens. The Duke of Burgundy, always a gorgeous dresser, needed no help; he wore a doublet of velvet embroidered with forty sheep and forty swans, each with a pearl bell around its neck.

  Twelve hundred bourgeois led by the Provost lined the avenue, in gowns of green on one side of the street and gowns of crimson on the other. Such crowds of people had gathered to watch “as seemed that all the world had been there.” Houses and windows the length of the Rue St. Denis were hung with silks and tapestries, and the street itself covered with fine fabrics “in such plenty as if they cost nothing.”

  Entering Paris through the Porte St. Denis, the procession passed under a heavenly sky of cloth stretched over the gate, filled with stars, beneath which children dressed as angels sang sweetly. Next on the way was a fountain spouting red and white wines, served by melodiously singing maidens with golden cups; then a stage erected in front of the Church of Ste. Trinité, on which was performed the Pas Saladin, a drama of the Third Crusade; then another firmament full of stars “with the figure of God seated in majesty”; then “a gate of Paradise” from which descended two angels with a crown of gold and jewels which they placed on the head of the Queen with appropriate song; then a curtained enclosure in front of St. Jacques within which men played organ music. At the Châtelet a marvelous mock castle and field of trees had been erected as the scene of a play dramatizing the “Bed of Justice.” Its theme was the favorite popular belief that the King was invested with royalty in order to maintain justice in favor of the small against the great. Amid a flurry of birds and beasts, twelve maidens with naked swords defended the White Hart from the Lion and the Eagle.

  So many wonders were to be seen and admired that it was evening before the procession crossed the bridge leading to Notre Dame and the climactic display. High on a tightrope slanting down from the tower of Notre Dame to the roof of the tallest house on the Pont St. Michel, an acrobat was poised with two lighted candles in his hands. “Singing, he went upon the cord all along the great street so that all who saw him had marvel how it might be.” With his candles still burning, he was seen all over Paris and for two miles outside. The return of the procession from the cathedral at night was lighted by 500 torches.

  The coronation and other festivities were thick with cloth of gold, ermine, velvets, silks, crowns, jewels, and all the gorgeous glitter that might dazzle the onlookers. A grand banquet was held in the same hall in which Charles V had entertained the Emperor, followed by a similar pageant (using what may have been the same props) showing the Fall of Troy with castles and ships moving about on wheels. At the high table with the King and Queen were seated only prelates and eight ladies, including the Dame de Coucy and the Duchess of Bar. The King wore his golden crown and a surcoat of scarlet furred with ermine which, considering that it was August, gave point to Deschamps’ advice about light clothing in summer. Such was the crowding and heat of the hall that the Queen, who was seven months pregnant when she went through these five days of continuous ceremony in mid-August, nearly fainted and the Dame de Coucy did faint, and one table of ladies was overthrown by the press of people. Windows were broken open to let in the air, but the Queen and many ladies retired to their chambers.

  The hot weather affected the tournaments too; so much dust was raised by the horses’ feet that the knights complained, but the Sire de Coucy as usual “shone brilliantly.” The King ordered 200 barrels of water to lay the dust, “yet next day they had dust enough and too much.”

  Forty of the leading bourgeois of Paris presented the King and Queen with gifts of jewels and vessels of gold in the hope of remittance of taxes. Carried by two men dressed as ancient sages, the gifts were enclosed in a litter covered by a fine silk gauze through which the sparkle of jewels and gleam of gold could be seen. This imaginative presentation was less persuasive than it deserved to be. Two months later, when the King left for a tour of the south to display his newfound sovereignty to the people and seek to relieve their oppressions, taxes were raised in Paris as soon as he left to pay for the cost of the Queen’s entry and for the new journey, which in turn proved so sumptuous that it resulted not in lowered but in increased taxes. In a manipulation of the currency to aid the cost, the circulation of small silver coins of four pence and twelve pence, which were the common cash of the people, was forbidden in Paris, depriving the poor for two weeks of the means to purchase food in the market place. Who can say whether two weeks of hunger and anger weighed heavier in the balance than the miraculous vision of the acrobat on his tightrope and the fountains of running wine?

  * The original—“M’a souvent le poing fouci/De beaux florins a rouge escaille”—is obscure, but may refer to the fact that coins of good value, not worn or clipped, were often put in a bag tied at the top and sealed with colored wax, in this case a “red seal.”

  Chapter 22

  The Siege of Barbary

  Coucy reached the age of fifty in 1390. He was now the leading noble, apart from the King’s brother and maternal uncle, in the royal entourage, relied on equally for political mission and military command. He held official positions as Captain-General of Auvergne and Guienne and member of the Royal Council, but his adventures in his fiftiet
h year carried him far beyond these assignments.

  When in September 1389 Charles VI set out with his brother Louis and his uncle Bourbon to confer with the Pope in Avignon and exhibit kingship in Languedoc, Coucy commanded the royal escort. The purpose of the journey was, first, to work out with Pope Clement a means of regaining sole control of the papacy, and, second, to mend the crown’s fences in Languedoc, alienated by the oppressions of the Duc de Berry. Delegates from the south had told the King on their knees and in tears of the “crushing tyranny” and “intolerable exactions” of Berry’s officers. Unless the King acted, they said, the 40,000 people of Languedoc who had already fled to Aragon would be followed by many more.

  Now that there was truce with England, Charles was advised by Rivière and Mercier to make the journey in order to learn how his subjects were governed and make himself more beloved by them, for the sake of funds “of which he had great need.” At 22, the age at which his father had been a mature ruler, Charles VI was a shallow youth, spending what he did not have in a cascade of largesse. Efforts of Treasury officials to stem the flow by writing alongside the names of recipients, “He has had too much” or “He should repay,” were in vain.

  Burgundy and Berry were greatly vexed to be informed by the King that they were not to accompany him on the journey but must remain on their own estates. Knowing that the order originated with Rivière and Mercier, and that the King was going to “hold inquisitions” on those who had governed Languedoc, they consulted together and agreed that they must “dissemble this affront,” but that the time would come “when those who have advised it shall repent of it.” As long as they remained united, they told each other, others “cannot do us any injury for we are the greatest personages in France.” “Such,” writes Froissart in unblushing reconstruction, “was the language of these two dukes.”