A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Knights of Picardy, Artois, Vermandois, and Hainault came with their squires and men-at-arms to “advance themselves in honor” in Coucy’s enterprise. “Honor” in the lexicon of chivalry meant combat against other knights, anticipated in this case against the Austrians. The elasticity of the human mind allowed honor to be unaffected by partnership with mercenaries and brigands. Among the recruits were Raoul de Coucy, Enguerrand’s uncle, the Vicomtes de Meaux and d’Aunay and other seigneurs, and not least that celebrated and busy warrior Owen of Wales. Son of a father executed by the King of England, Owen had been brought up at the court of Philip VI. Described as high-spirited, haughty, bold, and bellicose, he had fought at Poitiers, in the Lombard wars of the 1360s, for and against the Dukes of Bar in Lorraine, as a free-lance in Spain, and with Du Guesclin in the campaigns of the 1370s, during which he had returned from leading a naval raid on the Channel Islands to capture the Captal de Buch.

  In 1375 Owen was fresh from action at the successful siege of St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte on the coast of Normandy, where for the first time cannon had been used with notable effect. Forty “engines” great and small, projecting balls of iron and leather as well as stone, failed to bring down the walls but so harassed the defenders that they could not continue resistance. “They were so covered by the engines that they did not dare go into the town or outside the castle but stayed in the towers.” Even there one ball penetrated a room where an English captain lay sick in bed and rolled around the walls several times “as if the thunder itself had entered his chamber,” convincing him his last hour had come, before it crashed through the floor to the room below.

  Under contract with Coucy dated October 14, 1375, the prodigious Owen was to lead 400 men at a pay of 400 francs a month plus another 100 francs for his lieutenant, Owen ap Rhys. He was to take second place to no other captain and make no other alliance until released, while Coucy in turn was to make no peace without Owen’s agreement. Any town or fortress taken by Owen was to be yielded to Coucy, but he could retain booty and prisoners worth less than 200 francs in ransom. Of those worth more than that, Coucy was to receive one sixth of the value, and in the event of the Duke of Austria himself being captured, Owen was required to deliver him to Coucy in return for payment of 10,000 francs.

  The enterprise became a magnet for restless swords, attracting from their annual Prussian sport 100 knights of the Teutonic Order. The ink on the Truce of Bruges was hardly dry before English knights too came riding to the rendezvous, attracted by the leadership of the King of England’s son-in-law. Well armed, on fine horses with silver bridles, wearing sparkling cuirasses and helmets and magnificent long surcoats, the English, supposedly numbering “6,000,” cast their fearful reputation over Coucy’s entire army with the result that their opponents were to identify them all as Engländer.

  The total number, though vague, evoked awed estimates of forty, fifty, sixty, even one hundred thousand. Estimated by the number of captains, it was probably somewhere around 10,000, comparable to the army Du Guesclin led to Spain. An Alsatian chronicle mentions 16,000 knights “in helmets and hoods.” The pointed helmets and cowl-like hoods on heavy cloaks worn against the cold were noticed by all observers. Called Gügler (from the Swiss-German for cowl or point), the hoods gave their name to what became known as the Gügler War.

  Before leaving, Coucy took care for the future of his soul in case he met death. On a grand scale befitting his rank, he endowed two masses “every day and in perpetuity” at the Abbey of Nogent-sous-Coucy for himself, his ancestors, and his successors. His instructions, like most of their kind, were precise and specific, leaving nothing to choice. The prayers were to be said in front of the image of Notre Dame in the chapel, already designated as the site for his and his wife’s tombs. One hundred livres a year were assigned for the upkeep of the monks and the augmentation of Divine service. The money was to be taken from “perpetual” rents and from the taille due to Coucy from particular towns, specified to the exact penny, 50 livres from one, 45 livres and 10 sous from another, 4 livres and 10 sous from a third. Like his contemporaries, Coucy counted on a perpetuity without change. He further donated to the monks of Nogent for their sole use the rights to the fish in the river Ailette over a given distance from the Rue de Brasse to the Pont St. Mard.

  Solid and everlasting, Coucy’s bequest did not exhibit the urgency of some donors. The Captal de Buch in a will of 1369, the year he abandoned French fealty, evidently felt the need of immediate sanction: he left 40,000 gold écus for 50,000 masses, all to be said within a year of his death, plus perpetual lamps and additional pious legacies.

  These endowed chantries, ranging up to periods of thirty or fifty years or perpetuity, and usually including the relatives of the donor, provided employment to the clergy and income to the churches. Unattached priests with no other function could make a living from the commissions and otherwise lead, as was popularly supposed, an idle and dissolute life. The Princess of Wales maintained three priests whose only duty was to say prayers for her deceased first husband.

  While his assembled forces plundered Alsace for six weeks through October and into November, Coucy still had not taken command. His delay is the first puzzle among many that cannot be unraveled in this strange winter war because of gaps and contradictions in the record. Did he postpone deliberately to add to the chance of depleting the companies through the hardships of winter? The fact that Du Guesclin too, in 1365, did not begin his march across the Pyrenees until December suggests a pattern. But Coucy was clearly intending to fight it out with his mother’s cousin Leopold, not merely to lead the companies on a goose-chase over the Jura and lose them somewhere in the mountain snows.

  At the end of September he had written to the Duke of Brabant, imperial Vicar in Alsace, informing him of his intention to reclaim Brisgau, Sundgau, and the small county of Ferrette, and had received an assurance that no imperial action would be taken to oppose his efforts to obtain justice. Further to make a case for a just war and distinguish himself from a mere captain of mercenaries, Coucy also wrote to the towns of Strasbourg and Colmar in Alsace disclaiming any threat against them, stating his claim against his cousin, urging them not to take alarm but to aid him in obtaining his rights, and offering to explain his case further if they wished. This elicited no answer, since beneath the city walls the companies were already doing their worst.

  If the cry of horror in the local chronicles is evidence, never was carnage worse than in Alsace. Forty villages in the Sundgau were robbed and wrecked, 100 inhabitants of Wattwiller killed without mercy, men and women seized to serve the brigands’ needs, the Franciscan monastery of Thann burned to the ground, the convent of Schoenensteinbach so ruined that it was abandoned and its lands not cleared again for twenty years. The companies exacted their usual tribute, which the rich paid in money, horses, and fine fabrics, and the poor in shoes, horseshoes, and nails. When questioned as to the purpose of their campaign, some captains reportedly replied that they had come for “60,000 florins, sixty stallions fit for combat, and sixty garments of gold cloth.” The Bishop and magistrates of Strasbourg paid 3,000 florins to ransom the city from attack. In one place where a band of combative villagers succeeded in killing twenty of the enemy billeted among them, they suffered such cruelties in retaliation that audacity gave way to despair and they fled, abandoning their homes.

  At the outset, the captains in Coucy’s pay had endeavored to maintain discipline, and some hanged culprits almost daily in an effort to stop the disorders. Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control.

  In the face of invasion, Leopold adopted the same strategy as had Charles V: he ordered the Alsatians to destroy everything that could aid, shelter, or feed the enemy and to retreat with their goods and provisions within walled towns and castles. Like Charles, he ordered the fortifying of towns and castles capable of defense, the razing of others, and the burning of outlying villages. On paper such orders are
easily assumed; in practice, it would have been agony for a peasant to destroy or see destroyed the product of his labor, the slim margin of his life for another year. To what extent these drastic measures were actually carried out is hard to judge.

  Lacking sufficient force to confront Coucy’s numbers, Leopold withdrew into the fortress of Breisach across the Rhine and counted on exciting the resistance of the self-reliant Swiss to repel the enemy from further advance. He had painful reason to know the capacity for combat of his Swiss subjects.

  Whether real or legendary, William Tell’s defiance of the Austrian bailiff Gessler at the start of the century personified the struggle against Hapsburg tyranny. Twice thereafter in the last sixty years the Swiss had humiliated the Hapsburg cavalry. At Morgarten and Laupen in 1315 and 1339 the victories of the man on the ground over the mounted knight had made military history. At Morgarten in the forest Canton of Schwyz, the Swiss, concealed above a mountain pass, hurled down boulders and tree trunks on the knights as they rode through the narrow defile, and then charged upon the scrambled mass and slew them “like sheep in the hurdles.” They gave no quarter, for they expected no ransom, and they carried the field because it was they and not their foe who had chosen where to fight. The knights claimed terrain as the cause of defeat, and in fact the disadvantage of cavalry in the mountains, where it could not charge, was an element, no less than the defiant spirit of the cantons, in the ultimate gain of Swiss independence.

  At Laupen on an open hillside, no excuse of terrain could explain away the result. There the city levy of Berne, joined by mountain men of the Forest Cantons, advanced under the command of a local knight and took their position upon a hill requiring ascent by the Hapsburg knights. In the clash the Swiss, though surrounded, formed a “hedgehog” phalanx that stood its ground and withstood penetration. While they engaged the knights in hand-to-hand combat, inflicting terrible wounds with their halberds—a combination of ax and pike—their reserve fell upon the nobles from behind and crushed them. Seventy crested helms and 27 noble banners were carried from the field. Though a generation had passed since then, the Güglers might have taken warning.

  The Swiss responded meagerly to Leopold’s summons for defense against Coucy. They hated the Hapsburg more than they feared the invaders. The three Forest Cantons in the center of the country refused action. Led by Schwyz, boldest of the three and patronym of the future nation, they said they had no interest in sacrificing themselves to defend Leopold’s territory against the Sire de Coucy, who had never offended them. They would remain “spectators of this war,” except to defend themselves against the victor if he pushed his enterprises too far. Zürich, however, along with Berne, Lucerne, and Solothurn agreed to defend the Aargau, the region adjoining Alsace along the river Aar, because it touched their borders and was their “boulevard.”

  On or about St. Martin’s Day, November 11, Coucy with 1,500 men arrived in Alsace to take command. By now, with winter approaching, the area had been thoroughly ravaged until no more provisions or forage were to be found. At this juncture a startling distortion of events occurs in the record which, coming from Froissart, who was to learn much of Coucy’s history from his own mouth, is inexplicable. Mutinous captains, according to Froissart, called a meeting to accuse Coucy of deceiving them. “How’s this?” they cried. “Is such as this the duchy of Austria? The Sire de Coucy told us it was one of the fattest lands of the world and we find it poor. He has shabbily deceived us. If we were across the Rhine, we could never return before we were all dead or captured by our enemies the Germans, who are men without pity. Let us return to France, and cursed be he who advances further!”

  Suspecting he was about to be betrayed, Coucy spoke to them softly, saying, “Sirs, you have taken my money and my gold for which I am deeply indebted to the King of France, and you are obliged by oath and by faith to acquit yourselves loyally in this enterprise. Otherwise I shall be the most dishonored man in the world.” But the companies refused to move, growling that the Rhine was too wide to be crossed without ships, they did not know the roads beyond, and “no one should take men-at-arms out of a good country as you have done.”

  The Rhine, which makes a right angle turn at Basle, would not in fact have to be crossed to enter the Aargau, but it loomed large, if not precisely located, in common knowledge. To the mercenary, the world he traveled in was as vague in outline as the political purpose for which he was being used. Coucy tried to persuade them that once across the dark mountains they saw ahead they would find good land, but without avail. A message from Leopold at this point offered to grant Coucy one of the territories he had demanded, the county of Ferrette worth 20,000 francs a year, but the offer was rejected because Coucy and his advisers considered it too small.

  In Froissart’s version, Coucy on discovering that the men would go no further was “greatly melancholy” and, “taking counsel with himself as a wise and far-seeing knight,” he considered that the mercenaries might well sell him to the Duke of Austria in lieu of promised wages, “and if he should be delivered over to the Germans he would never be freed.” After consulting with his friends, he decided he had better return to France. With only two companions he departed secretly at night “in disguise,” and had traveled two days’ journey out of danger before any but close associates knew he had gone. When he reached France, the King and his brothers were “greatly astonished because they thought him in Austria and it seemed to them that they saw three ghosts.” Asked to give an account of himself, Coucy had no trouble in explaining the affair, “for he was an eloquent speaker and had a true excuse.” He told the King and Dukes everything that had occurred “so that it might be seen that he was in the right and the companies to blame.”

  The fact that nothing of the kind happened illustrates the problem of medieval records. Coucy and the companies did indeed go forward into the Aargau, leaving Alsace on St. Catherine’s Day, November 25, and marching to Basle, where they paraded around the city for three days in a display of strength, presumably to discourage any opposition to their advance over the Jura. The Bishop of Basle gave them free passage, it was said, out of hatred for Berne.

  At close hand, the purple darkness of the Jura was seen to be pines covering a low range that did not rise above tree level. Riding along a stream that rushed toward France in the opposite direction, the hooded men-at-arms crossed over the crest, forced the passes at Hauenstein and Blasthal, descended among the valley hamlets, robbing and destroying as they went, until they came to the Aar, a wide tributary of the Rhine marking the frontier of the Aargau. Meeting little resistance, because lords of the region fled before the invaders to take refuge with Leopold, they seized castles and the ancient wooden bridge at Olten.

  Urgently summoned by Leopold, the Bernese had advanced to meet the enemy, but seeing the nobles abandon the territory, they had turned in disgust and marched home. All Aargau in a fright abandoned arms and villages for refuge in the towns, leaving the Güglers masters of the countryside. Infuriated by the Bernese disobedience, Leopold laid ruthless waste in front of the enemy. His agents burned fields and harvests, felled trees, and left such a wake of misery that little villages were hard pressed that winter to fight off the wolves that came out of the forest. The embittered people mocked the Austrians who “lay across the Rhine, safe as in a coffer.” They accused Count Rudolph of Nidau and other local lords of opening the way to the torrent that would devastate the cantons.

  Coucy’s men-at-arms swept up what they could find. Dividing themselves into three groups they spread out farther and farther into the Aargau as hunger and plunder drove them. Coucy made his headquarters less than five miles east of the river in the Abbey of St. Urbain, set with its back to a crescent of pine-covered hills and looking out over a wide sweep of meadow land. According to the abbey’s records, he stayed there eighteen days. The more important cities of the Aargau had been made pledges for the unpaid portion of his mother’s dowry. Had he been able to take these cities, his person
al goal might have been gained, but the scattering of his forces and the strength of walls against men prevented it. He could do no better than Edward had in France. Even the small town of Büren in the Aar valley withstood a siege he conducted in person, although its lord, the Count of Nidau, reaped the punishment of his double-dealing when he put his head out of a window and was killed by an enemy arrow.

  In December’s cold the companies, hunting in small parties to spread their foraging, penetrated to the frontiers of Zürich and Lucerne. Their thinning out made them vulnerable at the same time that their crimes were arousing Swiss defiance. In Schwyz, near the lake of Sempach, in the mountain district of Entlibuch, a stalwart peasantry, proud of ancient privileges, assembled a body of several hundred for action. Stirred by their example, the young men of Lucerne, against city orders, climbed over the walls at night to join them, along with others from surrounding towns. On December 19 the group, numbering about 600, surrounded the small town of Buttisholz, where a company of “3,000” Güglers was billeted. The Swiss attacked, slew 300, and burned others alive in a church where they had taken refuge. The rest were put to flight. Triumphantly the men of Entlibuch, with captured arms and trophies, rode back to their mountains. Seeing them pass, a noble who had not fought called mockingly from his castle to a mountaineer riding the war-horse and wearing the helmet and cuirass of a dead knight, “Noble sir of noble blood, should villeins wear such arms?” The Entlibucher shouted back, “Sir, today we have so mixed the blood of nobles and horses that one cannot be told from the other.” On the site of the skirmish a monument was raised commemorating the Niederlage der Gügler.