A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  From Lyon, the King and his party continued the journey to Avignon by boat down the Rhône, a more comfortable form of travel than horseback. On such trips the royal suite would fill several boats including one with a room containing two fireplaces for the King, and others with kitchens and offices and a supply of plate and jewels to pawn for cash if necessary on the voyage. Charles’s passage down the rushing Rhône must have included many stops to make himself known to towns en route, for the trip took nine days. Organized welcome was not very different then than now. As many as a thousand children dressed in the royal colors were stationed on wooden platforms to wave little flags “and make heard, as the King rode by, loud acclamations in his honor.”

  On October 30, clad in scarlet and ermine, Charles made his entry into the papal palace, where he was met by Clement and 26 cardinals, and attended a splendid banquet with all his party. He presented the Pope with a blue velvet cope embroidered in pearls in a design of angels, fleur-de-lys, and stars. Empty purse or not, “he wished to be spoken of even in foreign countries for the magnificence he displayed.”

  With no footing except in French support, Clement’s papacy would have vanished like smoke, and the ruinous schism brought to an end, if the French had made that their object. But they did not. To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers. To impose Clement on Italy by power politics or force of arms had never been feasible. It was Urban of Rome, crazy or not, and afterward his successor who had popular support as the true Pope. Ignoring the obvious, and the disparity between goal and means, the French pursued their aim with the blind persistence that amounts to frivolity.

  In conferences with Clement, Charles VI and his counselors proposed to open his way to Rome and assist him to gain control of Italy by establishing Louis of Orléans in a revival of the cloudy Kingdom of Adria in the north, and Louis II of Anjou in the equally unattained Kingdom of Naples and Sicily in the south. To this end, Louis II, brought to Avignon by his tireless mother, was given a grand coronation as King of Naples and Sicily (including Jerusalem). Coucy, again chosen for grace and splendor on these occasions, performed the ceremony of serving the boy King on horseback, along with the Count of Geneva, brother of Pope Clement.

  Hardly were these arrangements completed when news was received that the Roman Pope, Urban the terrible, had been dead for three weeks and his seat filled in haste and secrecy by the election of a Neapolitan cardinal, Piero Tomacelli, as Boniface IX. Rome no more than Avignon was prepared to give up its claim in favor of a negotiated solution. Given no chance to take advantage of Urban’s death, the French and Clement now agreed to pursue the problem of removing Boniface. Charles VI promised that on his return to France he would “give attention to no other thing until he had restored the Church to unity.”

  Lighter-hearted activities engaged the King while these matters were being resolved. He and his brother Louis and young Amadeus of Savoy, son of the late Green Count, “being young and giddy,” spent every night in song and dance with the ladies of Avignon, who warmly praised the King for the many fine presents he lavished on them. The Pope’s brother acted as master of the revels. The most memorable of the entertainments was a literary competition on an issue of courtly love: whether fidelity or inconstancy brings the greater satisfaction. Embodied in a group of poems called the Cent Ballades, the symposium originated among four ardent young knights, including Boucicaut and Comte d’Eu, a cousin of the King, who had been thrown together while on a recent venture in the Holy Land. While temporarily imprisoned in Damascus, the four had passed the time by a debate in verse, and on returning via Venice in time to join the gathering at Avignon, had invited responses from noble friends and princes.

  Louis d’Orléans contributed a ballad, as did Guy de Tremolile, Jean De Bucy, a follower of Coucy’s, and another Bastard of Coucy named Aubert. He was Enguerrand’s former squire and first cousin, a son of his father’s brother, subsequently legitimized by Charles VI after Enguerrand’s death. Nothing is known of him except that Deschamps describes him as one of his “persecutors” among a group overfond of wine. Although Enguerrand’s friends and adherents entered the competition, he himself did not, which is perhaps a minor clue to personality.

  Before the advent of the printing press, literature was enjoyed like chamber music in groups. The audience for the Cent Ballades heard the case for fidelity made in the name of an elderly knight representing Hutin de Vermeilles, a real individual known for loyalty in love and respect for women. Hutin’s argument is the traditional one that faithful love surpasses mere “delectation of the body” because it improves the lover, generates courtesy to all women for love of one, and enhances the warrior’s prowess in his desire to rejoice the heart of his beloved. Love makes him more valiant in siege, raids, ambush, in vanguard or defense, pilgrimage to Jerusalem or crusade against the Turks. The case for Falsity, in turn, was made in the name of a woman called La Guignarde, who stresses the joys of promiscuity and the dangers of a serious liaison. “All lovers” are then called upon to judge the dispute.

  Although a majority of the noble versifiers declare for Hutin and Loyalty, some are ambiguous. The Duc de Berry, who had just married his twelve-year-old bride, felicitates himself on having “escaped love” and recommends talking Fidelity and practicing Falsity. The same tone is taken by the Bastard of Coucy, who breathes passionate devotion and eternal love in each of his stanzas, and ends each with the refrain,

  Aussi dist on, mais il n’en sera riens.

  (So they say, but it comes to nothing.)

  His is the most cynical of the ballads. Of the others, some are candid, some satirical, some ambivalent, a few serious but none expresses anything deeply felt, as they would have had the subject been knighthood. Courtly love was an accustomed game, not a motivating ideal to which men desperately clung and for which, like the knights who held the lists of St. Ingelbert, they staked their lives.

  Moving on to Languedoc, Charles VI and his court made ceremonial progress through Nîmes, Montpellier, Narbonne to Toulouse, feted so grandly through richly decorated streets “that it was a marvel to see.” Processions of all groups and classes, each in appropriate robes, welcomed him, and tables were set out at which the people could eat and drink. The King’s larder was supplied by his subjects: at one town he was presented with a troop of sheep and twelve fat oxen as well as twelve hunting horses hung with silver bells. Meanwhile, his ministers inquired into conditions, ordered reforms, and lifted the heaviest taxes.

  Royal intervention staged its greatest gesture at Béziers in the punishment of Berry’s chief officer, the hated Bétizac. Secret inquiries of the King’s ministers had disclosed many “atrocious acts and such great extortions as made the whole country cry out against him.” Upon arrest and interrogation, Bétizac insisted that all the moneys, amounting to three million francs, had been duly paid over to the Duc de Berry and accounted for. His papers when seized appeared to confirm him. His conduct did not appear to warrant the death penalty, for, as certain of the investigators said, “How can he help it if the sums have been extravagantly spent … for this Duc de Berry is the most covetous man alive.” Others disagreed, saying Bétizac had so impoverished the people “that the blood of these poor creatures cries out against him.” He should have remonstrated with the Duke or, failing to restrain him, have informed the King and Council.

  News of Bétizac’s arrest brought a flood of public complaints showing how much he was hated by the people, and, at the same time, haughty letters from Berry acknowledging that all Bétizac had done had been done at his orders. Although the King wanted the Governor put to death, the Council was embarrassed to find judicial grounds for doing so, since his superior, Berry, had been appointed by the crown.

  The problem was solved by finesse. Bétizac was privately informed that he would surely be sentenced to die an
d that his only hope was to declare himself a heretic. If he did, he would be handed over to the Church and sent for judgment to Avignon, where no one would dare condemn him because of the Pope’s dependence on Berry, the most powerful and zealous of his supporters. Believing what he was told, “because those in peril of their lives are much confused in mind,” Bétizac did as advised. He affirmed his guilt in errors of faith before the Bishop of Béziers, who, according to Church practice with confessed heretics, promptly handed him back to the civil arm for execution. Dragged to the stake in the public square, fastened by collar and chain and piled with faggots, Bétizac was burned and his bones hanged, to the joy of the populace. Berry was deprived of the lieutenancy of Languedoc and replaced by a team of royal reformers. The people of the province acclaimed the young King for his justice and voted him an aid of 300,000 francs.

  Ambassadors from Genoa met the King at Toulouse, bringing a proposal for a “grand and noble enterprise” against the Berber Kingdom of Tunis. They wanted French chivalry to lead a campaign to suppress the Barbary pirates who, with the unofficial support of their sultan, harassed Genoese commerce, raided and plundered Sicily and the Mediterranean islands, and sold captured Christians in their slave markets. Assuming that France, since the truce with England, was free of inquietude, the Genoese felt that her knights, “having nothing to do, would be glad to join in the warfare.” The proposed objective was Mahdia,* the pirates’ main base and the best port on the Tunisian coast. With this great stronghold in Christian hands, the ambassadors told King Charles, the power of the Berber kings would be broken, and they could be destroyed or converted. Genoa offered to supply the necessary fleet, provisions, archers, and foot soldiers in return for the French combat arm—knights and squires only, no servants—led by a prince of the royal family to ensure a genuine commitment.

  Given the infidel as enemy, the proposal was dressed in all the aura of a crusade, and doused in flattery. For her historic exploits against the infidels, said the ambassadors, the name of France was feared as far as India, enough in itself to halt Turks and Saracens.† The infidels, they warned, dominate Asia and Africa; they have entered Europe, they threaten Constantinople, frighten Hungary, occupy Granada. But supported by Genoa, a French campaign would be short, and the glory long. “A fine thing for your sovereignty,” they told Charles, “for you are the greatest King among Christians and have so much renown.”

  The project was the scheme of that “very subtle man,” Antoniotto Adorno, Doge of Genoa, whose oppressions had raised an opposition party among his subjects. He hoped to blunt its threat by aiding the business enterprise of the republic, and gain at the same time a powerful ally in case of need. While French knights were excited by the prospect, ministers were cautious. Short of a permanent peace with England, they disapproved of sending French strength out of the country; and the question of leadership was bound to arouse jealousies. Pending further consultation, the Genoese had to go home without a firm answer.

  While at Toulouse, Coucy joined the royal party in a hunt which almost resulted in the sorely needed portrait that would have left his face to history. The hunters lost their way in a forest as night fell. Riding deeper and deeper into the dark maze, they could find no way out until the King vowed that if he escaped this peril he would donate the price of his horse to the chapel of Notre Dame de Bonne Espérance in the cloister of Carmes in Toulouse. In response, light broke through the sky, a path was seen, and next day the King duly fulfilled his vow, later commemorated by a fresco in the cloister containing the only known contemporary representation of Enguerrand de Coucy. Unfortunately, it shows no face. In the copies that survived the demolition of the cloister in 1808, he is seen among seven nobles in the train of the King, each identified by his coat of arms. They are Louis d’Orléans, the Duc de Bourbon, Henri de Navarre, Olivier de Clisson, Philippe d’Eu, Henri de Bar, and, lastly, Coucy, the only one with his face turned away from the viewer as if deliberately mocking posterity.

  Shortly afterward he may have gone to Spain to arrange with the King and Queen of Aragon for the marriage of their daughter, Yolande, aged eight, to Louis II of Anjou. Froissart’s account of this mission, which was designed to gain an ally in the Angevin quest of the crown of Naples, is a hopeless tangle of what could and could not have occurred. He states that Coucy escorted Anjou to an actual marriage, which in fact did not take place until 1400, and he sets the scene amid many other discrepancies of time and place. Nevertheless, a marriage contract was indeed concluded in 1390, and Coucy would have been the natural choice to negotiate it. The Duchesse d’Anjou had consistently sought his influence in her cause ever since her husband’s death; moreover, Coucy was related by marriage and well known to the Queen of Aragon, who was the former Yolande de Bar, his son-in-law’s sister. He had also served as proxy in young Louis’ previous marriage to Bernabò Visconti’s daughter, which had been neatly annulled when Bernabò fell from power.

  In Froissart’s version, the Duchesse d’Anjou entreated Coucy to escort her son to Spain and he “cheerfully agreed” to undertake the journey. Twelve-year-old Louis took leave of the Pope and his mother in tears, for “their hearts were wrung at the separation and it was uncertain when they should meet again.” Coucy and his charge rode by land to Barcelona (250 miles or more from Avignon or 200 from Toulouse) and on their arrival the Queen of Aragon was “particularly pleased to see the Sire de Coucy” and thanked young Louis of Anjou for bringing him, saying that “everything would be the better for it.” All this is natural enough although it probably did not happen; the fog of elapsed time has closed down over the facts.

  If indeed he went to Spain, Coucy would have seen a country on the edge of turmoil. The peninsula below the Pyrenees was now experiencing the tail of the storm of insurrections that had swept through Europe a decade before. The long civil wars between Pedro the Cruel and his half-brother Enrique had trailed the ineluctable wake of pillage, oppression, and taxes. Social anatagonism found vent against the Jews, who so regularly in history become a microcosm of the world’s larger ills. In Spain their role had been more prominent and prosperous than elsewhere. Pedro the Cruel had employed them extensively as advisors and agents, besides keeping a Jewish mistress, and his preference was made a theme of Enrique’s accusations until Enrique emerged the victor. Then he too used the Jews’ financial services.

  Popular hatred was inflamed by agitators who raised fears of the Jews’ increasing influence and demanded cancellation of debts owed to Christ-killers. Given a religious motive, economic fear can rise to fury. A fanatic Archdeacon, Ferran Martínez, preached a version of Hitler’s final solution. In 1391 murder, seizure of property, and forcible conversion of the Jews began, and this taste of violence soon turned into general insurrection against the clergy and propertied class, culminating in four days of terror in Barcelona. Protection of the Jews was denounced by the populace as treason to Christendom. Gradually, the rulers regained the upper hand, but aggression against the Jews had been too overt and physically damaging to be repaired. They were rendered vulnerable, and Spain susceptible, to the final expulsion one hundred years later.

  Coucy is recorded again in Toulouse on January 5, 1390, and on January 28 appeared in Avignon, where he testified at hearings in behalf of the canonization of a French saint. The candidate was the nobly born Pierre de Luxemburg, a youth of great sanctity and great family, recently deceased at seventeen, whose nomination was intended to enhance the status of the French Pope. Clement’s legitimacy could hardly be questioned if God had provided a saint within his sphere. Pierre’s name had been put forward under the highest auspices, first by the Duchesse d’Anjou in 1388, then by the new Chancellor of the University of Paris, Pierre d’Ailly, in the name of the King.

  A son of the chaste and pious Count Guy de St. Pol, who had died of the plague as a hostage in England, and of Jeanne de Luxemburg of the same family as the late Emperor Charles IV, Pierre had been orphaned at three and rather precociously renoun
ced the flesh in an oath of perpetual chastity at six. He was said to have imposed the same vow on a twelve-year-old sister and to have reproached his brother for laughing, on the ground that the Gospels recorded that Jesus had wept but not laughed. At eight he was an overgrown, hollow-chested ascetic, who was sent to study in Paris, where he practiced fasting and self-flagellation and demanded to enter the austere and currently fashionable Célestin Order. Opposed in this wish by his guardians, he regularly visited the Order to share its bread and water and sleep on the bare ground fully clothed without removing belt or shoes in order to be ready for prayers at midnight without losing time.

  His remarkable piety combined with high birth won him appointment as a canon at nine, as archdeacon some years later, as Bishop of Metz at fifteen and Cardinal at sixteen. The red robe did not discourage his austerities or lonely orisons. His life was “nothing but humility” and “always he fled from the vanities and superfluities of the world.” He spent the greater part of the day and night in solitary prayer or in writing down his sins in a notebook by candlelight and confessing them twice a day to his chaplain. His urgency, like Catherine of Siena’s loquacity, was sometimes too much for the chaplain, who occasionally feigned sleep when he heard Pierre knocking on his door in the middle of the night.

  The boy Cardinal developed a faculty for miraculous cures: he was credited with saving the Duchesse de Bourbon from labor pains lasting two weeks, healing wounds suffered in a tournament by Guy de Tremolile, resurrecting a steward of the Duc de Bourbon who had been felled by a thunderbolt, and outside this rather limited circle, restoring to health a poor workman who had been tortured by brigands. When he died of consumption and self-imposed rigors in 1387, he was buried by his wish in the paupers’ cemetery at Avignon, where his grave became an object of pilgrimage by the poor and sick, causing a “great marvel” at the visitations made there daily. Kings and nobles, including the Sire de Coucy, sent rich gifts and lamps of silver, and Froissart, who never missed the newsworthy, came to observe the crowds at the grave.