In Traini’s fresco, Death swoops through the air toward a group of carefree, young, and beautiful noblemen and ladies who, like models for Boccaccio’s storytellers, converse and flirt and entertain each other with books and music in a fragrant grove of orange trees. A scroll warns that “no shield of wisdom or riches, nobility or prowess” can protect them from the blows of the Approaching One. “They have taken more pleasure in the world than in things of God.” In a heap of corpses nearby lie crowned rulers, a Pope in tiara, a knight, tumbled together with the bodies of the poor, while angels and devils in the sky contend for the miniature naked figures that represent their souls. A wretched group of lepers, cripples, and beggars (duplicated in the surviving fragment of Orcagna), one with nose eaten away, others legless or blind or holding out a cloth-covered stump instead of a hand, implore Death for deliverance. Above on a mountain, hermits leading a religious contemplative life await death peaceably.
Below in a scene of extraordinary verve a hunting party of princes and elegant ladies on horseback comes with sudden horror upon three open coffins containing corpses in different stages of decomposition, one still clothed, one half-rotted, one a skeleton. Vipers crawl over their bones. The scene illustrates “The Three Living and Three Dead,” a 13th century legend which tells of a meeting between three young nobles and three decomposing corpses who tell them, “What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.” In Traini’s fresco, a horse catching the stench of death stiffens in fright with outstretched neck and flaring nostrils; his rider clutches a handkerchief to his nose. The hunting dogs recoil, growling in repulsion. In their silks and curls and fashionable hats, the party of vital handsome men and women stare appalled at what they will become.
Chapter 6
The Battle of Poitiers
Hardly emerged from the plague, France moved toward a military debacle that was to release a flood of disruptive consequences and become a determining event in the life of Enguerrand de Coucy. The external agent was England, but the cause lay in the unsubdued autonomies of the seigneurial class, acted on by a King with a genius for misgovernment.
Jean II, who succeeded his father, Philip VI, in August 1350, could have served Machiavelli as model for Anti-Prince. Impolitic and impetuous, he never made a wise choice between alternatives and seemed incapable of considering consequences of an action in advance. Though brave in battle, he was anything but a great captain. Without evil intent, he was to foster disaffection to the point of revolt and lose half his kingdom and his person to the enemy, thereby leaving his country leaderless to meet its darkest hour of the age. His subjects with surprising forbearance named him Jean le Bon (John the Good), using the surname, it has been supposed, in the sense of “prodigal” or “careless” or being a good fellow. Or it may have referred to Jean’s devotion to chivalric honor or to his alleged generosity to the poor, as illustrated by his once giving a purse to a servingmaid whose milk pails were knocked over by his greyhounds.
He came to the throne bent on taking the field to erase his father’s defeats of the past decade, and on the first day of his reign notified all the principal lords of the realm to hold themselves ready to appear at his summons when “the time should come.” The truce arranged after the fall of Calais and renewed during the Black Death was due to expire in April 1351. Inheriting an empty treasury, Jean had no money with which to pay an army, and could not move without first replenishing his funds and adapting his military resources. The need to learn something from the failures of Crécy and Calais was not lost on him, and he was groping with certain ideas for military reform.
His first act, however, within three months of becoming King, was to execute the Constable of France, Comte d’Eu, and sixteenth Comte de Guîns, a second cousin of Enguerrand VII, a man of powerful connections and “so courteous and amiable in every way that he was beloved and admired by great lords, knights, ladies and damsels.” Captured by the English at Caen in 1345, D’Eu had been unable to raise the ransom fixed by King Edward. When it came to important captives, Edward never let himself be limited by the principle of chivalry that a knight’s ransom should not be placed at a figure that would ruin him or exceed his revenue for one year. After four years of captivity, Comte d’Eu regained his liberty, supposedly in exchange for ceding to Edward his strategic castle and county of Guînes, adjoining Calais. On this suspicion, Jean had him beheaded upon his return to France without trial or public procedure of any kind. The King listened in silence to the pleas of D’Eu’s friends for his life, offering no reply except to swear that “he would never sleep so long as the Comte de Guînes lived”; or according to another version replying in tears, “You shall have his body and we his head.”
Jean could have chosen no better way to alienate the nobility whose support he needed than to execute a noble of D’Eu’s rank and many friends without public explanation or trial by his peers. If D’Eu had indeed acted treasonably (the truth remains obscure), the King had every need to make plain the reasons for his act, but Jean was either too willful or too wooden-headed to understand the advisability of good public relations.
His next act made matters worse. He gave the office of Constable to his relative and favorite, Charles d’Espagne, who was said to be the object of the King’s “dishonest affection,” and to have persuaded Jean to murder Comte d’Eu so that he himself might have his office. Besides the prestige of military command second to the King, the Constableship had lucrative perquisites attached to the business of assembling the armed forces. Bestowal of the post on Charles d’Espagne, who was unpopular in the usual way of kings’ favorites, added fury to the nobles’ dismay at a time when the King had reason enough to fear their separatist tendencies. The episode was a divisive opening of the reign at a time when it most needed unity.
Jean’s father, too, had been “ung bien hastif homs” (a very hasty man), and intermarriage for centuries with first cousins had left the Valois unstable. Jean retained Philip’s uneasiness about the legitimacy of his claim to the crown and Philip’s readiness, not without cause, to suspect treachery. In his capacity for sudden vindictiveness, he took after his mother, the lame Queen, who, despite her piety and good works, was called “a very cruel lady, for whomever she held in hate, he was dead without mercy.” She was credited with having prodded her husband to the act that so appalled his time—the execution in 1343 of fifteen Breton lords who were his prisoners.
In the warfare of the 1340s, Jean had besieged the English at Aiguillon for four months without success, showing himself, according to report, resistant to any advice, obstinate, and “hard to move when he had taken an opinion.” His most notable talent was for satisfying an exceptional avidity for money. He shared the Valois interest in arts and letters at least to the extent of commissioning French translations of the Bible and the Roman historian Livy and carrying books in his baggage when on campaign. As King he had his court painter, Girard d’Orléans, decorate his toilet stools, and he accumulated 239 tapestries made for his own use. His taste for luxury extended to everything but ministers, for he inherited from his father and kept in office a shady group, neither capable nor honest, who were despised by the nobles because they were of common birth and hated by the bourgeois for their avarice and venality. One of them, Simon de Buci, president of Parlement and member of the Secret Council, twice overreached himself in some way that required successive pardons. Robert de Lorris, the King’s chamberlain and Master of Accounts, was restored to office after surviving a charge of treason and another of embezzlement. Jean Poilevain, who was imprisoned for peculation, prudently obtained a letter of pardon before his case was judged. As financiers for the King, men like these were a central source of disaffection with his regime.
Jean’s first notable administrative act was a serious effort toward military coherence. It was becoming evident that the baronial right of independent withdrawal in the field, and independent response to the King’s summons, crippled large military endeavor. Half feudal, half mercen
ary, not yet national, the ad hoc collection that was the 14th century army was too subject to the private interests of its components to be a reliable instrument. The Royal Ordinance of April 1351 was an attempt to introduce, as far as knightly terms allowed, principles of dependability and command.
By raising rates of pay to meet the inflation caused by the Black Death, the ordinance confirmed the fact that the warrior’s function had become a trade for the poorer knights if not the grand seigneurs. The new rates under the ordinance were fixed at 40 sous (two livres) a day for a banneret, 20 sous for a knight, 10 for a squire, 5 for a valet, 3 for a foot soldier, 2½ for an armor-bearer or other attendant.
More significant was a provision designed to correct a critical fault on the medieval battlefield: the right of independent withdrawal. The new rule stipulated that every man in the host be subordinate to some captain and required an oath from all of the men “not to leave the company of their captain” without an order—that is, not to withdraw at will. An indication of how fragile was a commander’s reliance on the force he could expect to deploy, the ordinance also required captains of companies to notify the chief of battalion that they would be present at a forthcoming battle.
The ordinance proved ineffective chiefly for lack of dependable revenue to support an organized army. Provisioning added to the cost of wages. While local peasantry, paid or pillaged, usually furnished food and horses’ forage, a major expedition or siege or fleet at sea required organized supply of biscuit, smoked or salted meat and fish, wine, oil, and oats and hay for the horses. Ordinarily knights ate white bread made from wheat, meat in the form of beef, pork, and mutton, and drank wine daily. The common soldier received wine only on feast days or in active combat; otherwise he drank beer, ale, or cider, and ate rye bread, peas, and beans. Fish, cheese, olive oil, occasionally butter, salt, vinegar, onions, and garlic also figured in the rations. Poultry was so widely consumed and easily obtained that it was not recorded. Sugar, honey, mustard, spices, and almonds were kept for the wounded and sick and the privileged. On active duty, soldiers did not fast but were allotted fish as substitute for meat on the twelve “thin” days a month. The more continuous war became, as it did in the 14th century, the more organization and money it required.
The crown grasped for money by every means and favored the least scrupulous, which was debasing the coinage. Less directly obvious than aids and subsidies, it required no summoning of the Estates for consent. Coins called in were re-minted with a lower proportion of gold or silver and re-circulated at the old face value, with the difference being retained by the Treasury. Since the petty coins of daily use were those affected, the system reduced the real wages and purchasing power of the common people while bankers, merchants, and nobles, whose movable wealth was in large gold coins or gold and silver vessels and plate, were less affected. Under Jean II, manipulations were so frequent and erratic that they upset all values and succeeded in damaging and infuriating everyone except the manipulators themselves and those who could profit by holding back their gold. Abbot Gilles li Muisis of Tournai found the mysteries of the coinage even more obscure than the plague and was inspired to a famous verse:
Money and currency are very strange things.
They keep on going up and down and no one knows why;
If you want to win, you lose, however hard you try.
In 1351, the first year of Jean’s reign, the currency suffered eighteen alterations, and seventy in the course of the next decade.
The King’s personal idea for improving the military arm was to found an order of chivalry modeled, like King Edward’s recently founded Order of the Garter, on the Knights of the Round Table. Jean’s Order of the Star was intended to rival the Garter, revive French prestige, and weld the splintered loyalty of his nobles to the Valois monarchy.
The orders of chivalry, with all their display and ritual and vows, were essentially a way of trying to secure a loyal body of military support on which the sovereign could rely. That was in fact the symbolism of the Garter, a circlet to bind the Knight-Companions mutually, and all of them jointly to the King as head of the Order. First broached with much fanfare in 1344, the Order of the Garter was originally intended to include 300 proved knights, starting with the most worthy of the realm. When formally established five years later, it was reduced to an exclusive circle of 26 with St. George as patron and official robes of blue and gold. Significantly, the statutes provided that no member was to leave the King’s domain without his authority. The wearing of the Garter at the knee was further intended, in the words of the Order’s historian, as a “Caveat and Exhortation that the Knights should not pusillanimously (by running away from Battle) betray the Valour and Renown which is ingrafted in Constancy and Magnanimity.” Even knights of old knew fear and flight.
Since Jean’s object was to be inclusive rather than exclusive, he made the Order of the Star open to 500 members. Established “in honor of God, of our Lady and for the heightening of chivalry and augmenting of honor,” the full Order was to assemble once a year in a ceremonial banquet hung with the blazons of all its members. Companions were to wear a white tunic, a red or white surcoat embroidered with a gold star, a red hat, enameled ring of special design, black hose, and gilded shoes. They were to display a red banner strewn with stars and embroidered with an image of Our Lady.
At the annual banquet each would recite on oath all “the adventures that befell him in the year both shameful and honorable,” and clerks would take down the recitals in a book. The Order would designate the three princes, three bannerets, and three knights who during the year had done the most in arms of war, “for no deed of arms in peace shall be taken into account.” This meant no deed of private warfare as distinct from a war declared by the sovereign. Equally significant of the King’s intention was the reappearance of the oath not to withdraw, worded more sternly than in the ordinance and more explicitly than in the Order of the Garter. Companions of the Star were required, to swear they would never flee in battle more than four arpents (about 600 yards) by their own estimate, “but rather die or be taken prisoner.”
While the purpose behind the orders was practical, the form was already nostalgic. War had changed since the 12th century romances from which men knew the legends of the 6th century Round Table, if it ever existed. The legends had shaped chivalry as the principle of order of the warrior class “without which the world would be a confused thing.” But the quest of the Holy Grail was not an adequate guide to realistic tactics.
Chivalry’s finest military expression in contemporary eyes was the famous Combat of the Thirty in 1351. An action of the perennial conflict in Brittany, it began with a challenge to single combat issued by Robert de Beaumanoir, a noble Breton on the French side, to his opponent Bramborough of the Anglo-Breton party. When their partisans clamored to join, a combat of thirty on each side was agreed upon. Terms were arranged, the site was chosen, and after participants heard mass and exchanged courtesies, the fight commenced. With swords, bear-spears, daggers, and axes, they fought savagely until four on the French side and two on the English were slain and a recess was called. Bleeding and exhausted, Beaumanoir called for a drink, eliciting the era’s most memorable reply: “Drink thy blood, Beaumanoir, and thy thirst will pass!” Resuming, the combatants fought until the French side prevailed and every one of the survivors on either side was wounded. Bramborough and eight of his party were killed, the rest taken prisoner and held for ransom.
In the wide discussion the affair aroused, “some held it as a very poor thing and others as a very swaggering business,” with the admirers dominating. The combat was celebrated in verse, painting, tapestry, and in a memorial stone erected on the site. More than twenty years later Froissart noticed a scarred survivor at the table of Charles V, where he was honored above all others. He told the ever-inquiring chronicler that he owed his great favor with the King to his having been one of the Thirty. The renown and honor the fight earned reflected the knight’s no
stalgic vision of what battle should be. While he practiced the warfare of havoc and pillage, he clung to the image of himself as Sir Lancelot.
With dazzling munificence, regardless of depleted finances, Jean launched the Order of the Star at an opening ceremony on January 6, 1352. He donated all the robes and staged a magnificent banquet in a hall draped with tapestries and hangings of gold and velvet decorated with stars and fleur-de-lys. Furniture was carved and gilded for the occasion. After a solemn mass, the revels grew so boisterous that a gold chalice was smashed and some rich draperies stolen. While the knights caroused, the English seized the castle of Guînes, whose absent captain was celebrating with his companions of the Star.
To their own undoing, the companions of the Star took seriously the oath not to flee from battle. In 1352, during the war in Brittany, a French force led by Marshal Guy de Nesle was caught in ambush at a place called Mauron by an Anglo-Breton force of about equal numbers. The French could have fled and saved themselves but that they were bound by their oath not to retreat. Though surrounded, they stood and fought until virtually all were killed or captured. So thick lay the dead on the field that the body of Guy de Nesle was not recovered until two days later. Seven French bannerets and 80 or 90 knights lost their lives not counting those captured, leaving so great a hole in the Order of the Star as, “with the great mischiefs and misfortunes that were to follow, caused the ruin of that noble company.”
In France’s misfortunes a young man of twenty, Charles, King of Navarre, grandson of Louis X, saw his opportunity. Whether he really aimed at the French crown, or at revenge for wrongs done him, or at stirring trouble for its own sake like Iago, is a riddle concealed in one of the most complex characters of the 14th century. A small slight youth with glistening eyes and a voluble flow of words, he was volatile, intelligent, charming, violent, cunning as a fox, ambitious as Lucifer, and more truly than Byron “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Seductive and eloquent, he could persuade his peers or sway a mob. He allowed himself the same unbridled acts of passion as Jean and other rulers, but, unlike Jean, he was a plotter, subtle, bold, absolutely without scruple, but so swerving and unfixed of purpose as to undo his own plots. His only constancy was hate. He is known to history as Charles the Bad.