A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Another conspicuous guest was Enguerrand’s cousin and the bride’s uncle Amadeus VI of Savoy, called “the Green Count” from the occasion of his knighthood at nineteen when he had appeared in a series of tournaments wearing green plumes, green silk tunic over his armor, green caparisons on his horse, and followed by eleven knights all in green, each led into the lists by a lady in green leading her champion’s horse by a green cord. Amadeus yielded to no one in ostentation. While in Paris, where the shops were displaying their finest goods for the occasion, the Green Count enjoyed a shopping spree, leaving orders for jeweled necklaces, table knives, boots, shoes, plumes, spurs, and straw hats. He gave the King a “chapel” of rubies and large pearls costing 1,000 florins and bestowed three gold francs on Guillaume de Machaut for a romance presented to him by the poet. He took home to his wife four lengths of cloth of Reims costing 60 francs and a jaquette lined with 1,200 squirrel skins.

  Dinners and suppers, dancing and games at St. Pol and the Louvre crowded Clarence’s visit, including an elaborate banquet which cost the Duke of Burgundy 1,556 livres. All the abundant species of game, fish, and fowl then inhabiting the woods and rivers, as well as domestic meats especially fattened for the table, were available for eating. Forty kinds of fish and thirty different roasts appear among the recipes of the time. On Clarence’s departure the King presented him and his suite with gifts valued at “20,000” florins, part of a routine of gift-giving that, besides exhibiting the status of the giver, was useful to the receiver, who could turn the gifts into cash by pawning.

  The acme of ostentation awaited in Milan. To have bought a daughter of the King of France for his son and now a son of the King of England for his daughter was a double triumph for Galeazzo Visconti and one more marvel in the notoriety of the Vipers of Milan, so called from the family device of a serpent swallowing a struggling human figure, supposedly a Saracen. Two Visconti ruled jointly in Lombardy—Galeazzo and his more terrible brother, Bernabò. Murder, cruelty, avarice, effective government alternating with savage despotism, respect for learning and encouragement of the arts, and lusts amounting to sexual mania characterized one or another of the family. Lucchino, an immediate predecessor, had been murdered by his wife, who, after a notable orgy on a river barge during which she entertained several lovers at once including the Doge of Venice and her own nephew Galeazzo, decided to eliminate her husband to forestall his same intention with regard to her. The debaucheries of Matteo, eldest brother of Bernabò and Galeazzo, were such that he endangered the regime and was disposed of by his brothers in 1355, the year after their accession, “dying like a dog without confession.”

  War with the papacy, from which they had seized Bologna and other fiefs of the Holy See, was the Visconti’s major activity. When excommunicated by the Pope in the course of the war, Bernabò compelled the legate who brought him the Bull of Excommunication to eat it, including silken cord and seals of lead. He was supposed to have had four nuns burned and an Augustinian monk roasted alive in an iron cage for no known reason unless it was malice toward the Church.

  Greedy, crafty, cruel, and ferocious, given to paroxysms of rage and macabre humor, Bernabò was the epitome of the unbridled aristocrat. If any of his 500 hunting dogs was not in good condition, he would have the keepers hanged and all poachers as well. The Quaresima, a forty-day program of torture attributed to Bernabò and his brother, supposedly issued as an edict on their accession, was a catalogue so lurid as to make one hope it was intended to frighten, rather than for actual use. With the strappado, the wheel, the rack, flaying, gouging of eyes, cutting off of facial features and limbs one by one, and a day of torture alternating with a day of rest, it was supposed to terminate in death for “traitors” and convicted enemies.

  In his personal habits Bernabò was dedicated “to an astonishing degree to the vice of lust, so that his household appeared to be more the seraglio of a sultan than the habitation of a Christian prince.” He fathered seventeen children by his wife, Regina, said to be the only person who could approach him in his mad moods, and more than that number of illegitimate children by various mistresses. When Bernabò rode through the streets, all citizens were obliged to bend the knee; he would frequently say he was God on earth, Pope and Emperor in his own domain.

  Bernabò ruled in Milan, his brother Galeazzo in the ancient city of Pavia twenty miles away. More than 100 towers darkening Pavia’s narrow streets testified to the incessant strife of Italian towns. Galeazzo’s great square castle, just completed in 1365, was built into the northern wall of the town, overlooking gardens and fruitful countryside. Called by the chronicler Corio with patriotic pride “the first palace of the universe,” and by a later admirer “the finest dwelling place in Europe,” it was built of rose-red brick baked from Lombard clay, and boasted 100 windows surrounding a magnificent courtyard. Petrarch, who for eight years was an ornament of the Visconti court, described its crown of towers “rising to the clouds,” where “in one direction could be seen the snowy crest of the Alps and in the other the wooded Apennines.” On a balcony overlooking the moat, the family could dine in summer, refreshed by the sight of water and a view of gardens and forested park rich in game.

  A less melodramatic tyrant than his brother, Galeazzo was sober in personal habits and devoted to his wife, the “good and gentle” Blanche of Savoy. He wore his red-gold hair long, in braids or loose, or “sometimes resting on his shoulders in a silken net or garlanded with flowers,” and he suffered grievously from gout—“the malady of the rich,” as it was called by the Count of Flanders, who suffered from it too.

  The wedding of Lionel of England and Violante Visconti was to be held in Milan, leading city of Lombardy and inland rival of Venice and Genoa. As the center for trade below the Alps, it had dominated northern Italy for a thousand years. Its marvels, recorded by a friar of the previous century, included 6,000 fountains for drinking water, 300 public ovens, ten hospitals of which the largest accommodated 1,000 patients two to a bed, 1,500 lawyers, forty copyists of documents, 10,000 monks of all orders, and 100 armorers manufacturing the famous Milanese armor. By mid-14th century it was subject to the general habit of deploring decadence in comparison with the good simple days of yore. Men were reproved for extravagant fashions, especially if foreign—tight garments “in the Spanish manner,” monstrous spurs like the Tatars’, adornment with pearls after the French fashion. Women were reproved for frizzled hair and gowns that bared their breasts. Milan had so many prostitutes, it was said, that Bernabò taxed them for revenue to maintain the city walls.

  On arrival in Milan, Lionel was accompanied, in addition to his own suite, by 1,500 mercenaries of the White Company, which had switched from the Pope’s service to that of the Visconti. Eighty ladies all dressed alike—as was customary to enhance the pageantry of great occasions—in gold-embroidered scarlet gowns with white sleeves and gold belts, and sixty mounted knights and squires also uniformly dressed came in the train of Galeazzo to greet him. In addition to a dowry for his daughter so extensive that it took two years to negotiate, Galeazzo paid expenses of 10,000 florins a month for five and a half months for the bridegroom and his retinue.

  The stupendous wedding banquet, held outdoors in June, left all accounts gasping. Its obvious purpose was to testify to “the Largeness of Duke Galeas his soul, the full satisfaction he had in this match and the abundance of his coffers.” Thirty double courses of meat and fish alternated with presentation of gifts after each course. Under the direction of the bride’s brother, Gian Galeazzo the younger, now seventeen and father of a two-year-old daughter, the gifts were distributed among Lionel’s party according to rank. They consisted of costly coats of mail, plumed and crested helmets, armor for horses, surcoats embroidered with gems, greyhounds in velvet collars, falcons wearing silver bells, enameled bottles of the choicest wine, purple and golden cloth and cloaks trimmed with ermine and pearls, 76 horses including six beautiful little palfreys caparisoned in green velvet with crimson tassels,
six great war-horses in crimson velvet with gold rosettes, and two others of extra quality named Lion and Abbott; also six fierce strong daunts or war-dogs, sometimes used with cauldrons of flaming pitch strapped to their backs, and twelve splendid fat oxen.

  The meats and fish, all gilded,* paired suckling pigs with crabs, hares with pike, a whole calf with trout, quails and partridges with more trout, ducks and herons with carp, beef and capons with sturgeon, veal and capons with carp in lemon sauce, beef pies and cheese with eel pies, meat aspic with fish aspic, meat galantines with lamprey, and among the remaining courses, roasted kid, venison, peacocks with cabbage, French beans and pickled ox-tongue, junkets and cheese, cherries and other fruit. The leftover food brought away from the table, from which servants customarily made their meal, was enough, it was said, to feed a thousand men. Among those who shared the feast were Petrarch, an honored guest at the high table, and both Froissart and Chaucer among the company, although it is doubtful if the two young unknowns were introduced to the famous Italian laureate.

  Never did Fortune’s Wheel come down with such a crash; never was vainglory so reprimanded. Four months later, while still in Italy, the Duke of Clarence died of an undiagnosed “fever,” which naturally raised cries of poison, although, since it destroyed the influential alliance that Galeazzo had bought at such enormous expense, the cause was more likely the delayed effect of all those gilded meats in the heat of the Lombardy summer. Violante’s fate was no happier. She was next married to a half-mad sadist, the seventeen-year-old Marquis of Montferrat, who was given to strangling boy servants with his own hands. After his violent death she married a first cousin, one of Bernabò’s sons, who came to a violent end at the hands of her brother. She died at 31, three times a widow.

  Twelve months after the Visconti wedding, Enguerrand de Coucy was an envoy of the King at a wedding of greater political significance and no less splendor. Charles V had outmaneuvered the King of England to win for his brother Philip of Burgundy the same heiress that King Edward wanted for his son Edmund. She was Marguerite of Flanders, daughter and heir of Louis de Male, Count of Flanders, he who had once run away from union with Isabella. Edward had been negotiating for this lady of large expectations for five years, even to the point of pledging Calais and 170,000 livres to her father. But since the principals were related within the fourth degree of consanguinity, as hardly any two royal persons in Europe were not, a papal dispensation was needed. Determined to keep England and Flanders apart, Charles exploited the utility of a French Pope. Urban V refused the dispensation to Edmund and Marguerite and, after a decent interval, granted it to Philip and Marguerite, who were related in the same degree. The uniting of Burgundy and Flanders, so great a coup for France, carried the seed of a monstrous birth, for it created a state that was to contend with the parent and in the next century give England revenge in the darkest stage of the war.

  To please Marguerite’s passion for jewels, the Duke of Burgundy sent throughout Europe for diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, and bought, as the prize of the collection, a pearl necklace from Enguerrand de Coucy for 11,000 livres.

  Three enormous coffers of precious objects preceded Philip’s arrival in Ghent for the wedding. Through gifts and feasts to both nobles and burghers, processions and tournaments, escorting and meeting guests at the frontiers, and liveries made especially for the occasion, the Duke made every effort to win over and impress the Flemish. Ostentation for Philip was political, part of the process of building a state by prestige. He himself was always gorgeously dressed, affecting a hat with plumes of ostrich, pheasant, and “bird of India,” and another of gold ribbons and damask imported from Italy. A man of strenuous temperament, he spent days at a time hunting, often sleeping outdoors in the forest, played energetic tennis, and was the most restless traveler of the day, moving from place to place as often as one hundred times a year. Many of his journeys were pilgrimages, with a portable reliquary and rosary carried wherever he went. He attended mass almost as assiduously as the King, meditated alone like the King in a private oratory, and did not fail to make his religious offerings conspicuous. After his marriage, he presented the Virgin’s statue in the Cathedral of Tournai with a robe and mantle of cloth of gold lined with miniver and brilliantly embroidered with his and his wife’s coats-of-arms.

  Riding into Ghent resplendent in color and bells and richly draped horses, the nobility gathered for the wedding. “Especially,” reports Froissart, “the good Sire de Coucy was there, who made the finest showing at a festivity and knew better than any other how to conduct himself, and for that the King sent him.” Bit by bit the picture builds of a striking figure, one who stood out in manners and appearance among his peers.

  The amount the rich could squander on occasions like these in a period of repeated disasters appears inexplicable, not so much with regard to motive as with regard to means. Where, in the midst of ruin and decline and lowered revenues from depopulated estates and towns, did all the money come from to endow the luxury? For one thing, money in coin was not vulnerable to plague like human life; it did not disappear, and if stolen by brigands it re-entered circulation. In a reduced population the amount of hard cash available was proportionately greater. Probably too, in spite of the plague’s heavy mortality, the capacity to produce goods and services was not reduced, because so much of the population at the beginning of the century had been surplus. In proportion to the surviving rich, goods and services may have actually increased.

  Ostentation and pageantry to raise the ruler’s image above his peers and excite the admiration and awe of the populace was traditionally the habit of princes. But now in the second half of the 14th century it went to extremes, as if to defy the increased uncertainty of life. Conspicuous consumption became a frenzied excess, a gilded shroud over the Black Death and lost battles, a desperate desire to show oneself fortunate in a time of advancing misfortune.

  The sense of living in a time of affliction was expressing itself in art in a greater emphasis on human drama and human emotion. The Virgin becomes more anguished in sorrow for her dead son; in the Narbonne Altarpiece painted at this time, she is pictured swooning in the arms of her supporters. In another version by the Rohan Master, all humanity’s bewildered suffering is concentrated in the face of John the Apostle, who, as he supports the swooning mother at the foot of the cross, turns grief-stricken eyes to God as if to ask, “How could you let this happen?”

  Boccaccio felt the shadows closing in and turned from the good-humored, life-loving Decameron to a sour satire on women called Il Corbaccio (The Crow). Once the delight of his earlier tales, woman now appears as a greedy harpy, concerned only with clothes and lovers, ready to consort in her lechery with servant or black Ethiopian. Following The Crow, he chose another dispiriting theme on the fall from fortune of great figures in history who through pride and folly were reduced from happiness and splendor to misery.

  “Such are the times, my friend, on which we are fallen,” agreed Petrarch in a letter to Boccaccio of 1366. The earth, he wrote, “is perhaps depopulated of true men but was never more densely populated with vice and the creatures of vice.”

  Pessimism was a normal tone of the Middle Ages, because man was understood to be born doomed and requiring salvation, but it became more pervasive, and speculation about the coming of Anti-Christ more intense, in the second half of the century. Speculatores or scouts existed, it was believed, who watched for signs that would tell of the coming of “last things.” The end was awaited both in dread and in hope, for Anti-Christ would finally be defeated at Armageddon, ushering in the reign of Christ and a new age.

  * His name was Giovanni or Gian Galeazzo, but the shorter form is used to distinguish him from his son, Gian Galeazzo the younger.

  * With a paste of powdered egg yolk, saffron, and flour sometimes mixed with real gold leaf.

  Chapter 12

  Double Allegiance

  As events moved toward the re-opening of war between France and Englan
d, Enguerrand was caught by his English marriage on the prongs of a forked allegiance. He could neither take up arms against his father-in-law, to whom he owed fealty for his English lands, nor, on the other hand, fight against his natural liege lord, the King of France.

  King Charles was pressing hard on the issue of sovereignty raised by the Gascon lords. Taking pains to prepare an elaborate justification for resuming hostilities, the King asked for legal opinions from eminent jurists of the universities of Bologna, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orléans, who not surprisingly returned favorable replies. Draped in the law, Charles summoned the Black Prince to Paris to answer the complaints against him. “Fiercely beholding” the messengers, the Prince fittingly replied that he would gladly come, “but I assure you that it will be with helmet on our head and 60,000 men in our company.” Thereupon Charles promptly proclaimed him a disloyal vassal, pronounced the Treaty of Brétigny void, and declared war as of May 1369.

  As this situation developed, lords who held lands of both kings “were sore troubled in their myndes … and specially the lorde of Coucy, for it touched him gretly.” In the awkward predicament of owing allegiance to two lords at war with each other, a vassal, according to Bonet, should render his military service to the lord of his first oath and send a substitute to fight for the other—an ingenious but expensive solution. Coucy could not be compelled by King Edward to fight against his natural liege, but it was clear enough that if he fought for France, his great holdings as Earl of Bedford, and possibly Isabella’s too, would be confiscated.

  His first plan was to leave in pursuit of a Hapsburg inheritance from his mother which lay across the Jura on the Swiss side of Alsace and had been withheld from him by his cousins Albert III and Leopold III, Dukes of Austria. Although Coucy’s claim has been disputed and the circumstances are confused, he himself clearly had no doubts of his right. His seal of 1369 bears a shield quartered with the arms of Austria in the same fashion that Edward quartered his arms with those of France to represent his claim to the French crown. Faceless and barely two inches high, the tiny figure on the seal expressed by its unusual stance the same haughtiness as the Coucy motto. Unlike the typical noble’s seal of a galloping knight with upraised sword, the Coucy figure stands erect, in mail with closed visor, austere and stern, holding in its right hand a lance planted on the ground and in its left the shield. Such a standing figure, rarely used, implied regency or royal descent, and appeared in Coucy’s time on the arms of the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Bourbon. In one form or another, sometimes with a crest of plumes descending upon the shoulders, the upright immobile figure remained on Coucy’s seals throughout his lifetime.