A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century Read online

  By virtue of its location in the center of Picardy, the domain of Coucy, as the crown acknowledged, was “one of the keys of the kingdom.” Reaching almost to Flanders in the north and to the Channel and borders of Normandy on the west, Picardy was the main avenue of northern France. Its rivers led both southward to the Seine and westward to the Channel. Its fertile soil made it the primary agricultural region of France, with pasture and fields of grain, clumps of forest, and a comfortable sprinkling of villages. Clearing, the first act of civilization, had started with the Romans. At the opening of the 14th century Picardy supported about 250,000 households or a population of more than a million, making it the only province of France, other than Toulouse in the south, to have been more populous in medieval times than in modern. Its temper was vigorous and independent, its towns the earliest to win charters as communes.

  In the shadowed region between legend and history, the domain of Coucy was originally a fief of the Church supposedly bestowed on St. Remi, first Bishop of Reims, by Clovis, first Christian King of the Franks, in about the year 500. After his conversion to Christianity by St. Remi, King Clovis gave the territory of Coucy to the new bishopric of Reims, grounding the Church in the things of Caesar, as the Emperor Constantine had traditionally grounded the Church of Rome. By Constantine’s gift, Christianity was both officially established and fatally compromised. As William Langland wrote,

  When the kindness of Constantine gave Holy Church endowments

  In lands and leases, lordships and servants,

  The Romans heard an angel cry on high above them,

  “This day dos ecclesiae has drunk venom

  And all who have Peter’s power are poisoned forever.”

  That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages. The claim of the Church to spiritual leadership could never be made wholly credible to all its communicants when it was founded in material wealth. The more riches the Church amassed, the more visible and disturbing became the flaw; nor could it ever be resolved, but continued to renew doubt and dissent in every century.

  In the earliest Latin documents, Coucy was called Codiciacum or Codiacum, supposedly derived from Codex, codicis, meaning a tree trunk stripped of its branches such as those the Gauls used to build their palisades. For four centuries through the Dark Ages the place remained in shadow. In 910–20 Hervé, Archbishop of Reims, built the first primitive castle and chapel on the hill, surrounded by a wall as defense against Norsemen invading the valley of the Oise. Settlers from the village below, taking refuge within the Bishop’s walls, founded the upper town, which came to be known as Coucy-le-Château, as distinguished from Coucy-la-Ville below. In those fierce times the territory was a constant bone of conflict among barons, archbishops, and kings, all equally bellicose. Defense against invaders—Moors in the south, Norsemen in the north—had bred a class of hard-bitten warriors who fought among themselves as willingly and savagely as against outsiders. In 975 Oderic, Archbishop of Reims, ceded the fief to a personage called the Comte d’Eudes, who became the first lord of Coucy. Nothing is known of this individual except his name, but once established on the hilltop, he produced in his descendants a strain of extraordinary strength and fury.

  The dynasty’s first recorded act of significance, religious rather than bellicose, was the founding by Aubry de Coucy in 1059 of the Benedictine Abbey of Nogent at the foot of the hill. Such a gesture, on a larger scale than the usual donation for perpetual prayers, was meant both to display the importance of the donor and to buy merit to assure his salvation. Whether or not the initial endowment was meager, as the monastery’s rancorous Abbot Guibert complained in the next century, the abbey flourished and, supported by a flow of funds from successive Coucys, outlived them all.

  Aubry’s successor, Enguerrand I, was a man of many scandals, obsessed by lust for women, according to Abbot Guibert (himself a victim of repressed sexuality, as revealed in his Confessions). Seized by a passion for Sybil, wife of a lord of Lorraine, Enguerrand succeeded, with the aid of a compliant Bishop of Laon who was his first cousin, in divorcing his first wife, Adèle de Marie, on charges of adultery. Afterward he married Sybil with the sanction of the Church while her husband was absent at war and while the lady herself was pregnant as the result of still a third liaison. She was said to be of dissolute morals.

  Out of this vicious family situation came that “raging wolf” (in the words of another famous abbot, Suger of St. Denis), the most notorious and savage of the Coucys, Thomas de Marie, son of the repudiated Adèle. Bitterly hating the father who had cast his paternity in doubt, Thomas grew up to take part in the ceaseless war originally launched against Enguerrand I by the discarded husband of Sybil. These private wars were fought by the knights with furious gusto and a single strategy, which consisted in trying to ruin the enemy by killing or maiming as many of his peasants and destroying as many crops, vineyards, tools, barns, and other possessions as possible, thereby reducing his sources of revenue. As a result, the chief victim of the belligerents was their respective peasantry. Abbot Guibert claimed that in the “mad war” of Enguerrand against the Lorrainer, captured men had their eyes put out and feet cut off with results that could still be seen in the district in his time. The private wars were the curse of Europe which the crusades, it has been thought, were subconsciously invented to relieve by providing a vent for aggression.

  When the great summons of 1095 came to take the cross and save the Holy Sepulcher on the First Crusade, both Enguerrand I and his son Thomas joined the march, carrying their feud to Jerusalem and back with mutual hate undiminished. From an exploit during the crusade the Coucy coat-of-arms derived, although whether the protagonist was Enguerrand or Thomas is disputed. One or the other with five companions, on being surprised by a party of Moslems when out of armor, took off his scarlet cloak trimmed with vair (squirrel fur), tore it into six pieces to make banners for recognition, and thus equipped, so the story goes, fell upon the Moslems and annihilated them. In commemoration a shield was adopted bearing the device of six horizontal bands, pointed, of red on white, or in heraldic terms, “Barry of six, vair and gules” (gules meaning red).

  As his mother’s heir to the territories of Marie and La Fère, Thomas added them to the Coucy domain to which he succeeded in 1116. Untamed, he pursued a career of enmity and brigandage, directed in varying combinations against Church, town, and King, “the Devil aiding him,” according to Abbot Suger. He seized manors from convents, tortured prisoners (reportedly hanging men up by their testicles until these tore off from the weight of the body), personally cut the throats of thirty rebellious bourgeois, transformed his castles into “a nest of dragons and a cave of thieves,” and was excommunicated by the Church, which ungirdled him—in absentia—of the knightly belt and ordered the anathema to be read against him every Sunday in every parish in Picardy. King Louis VI assembled a force for war upon Thomas and succeeded in divesting him of stolen lands and castles. In the end, Thomas was not proof against that hope of salvation and fear of hell which brought the Church so many rich legacies through the centuries. He left a generous bequest to the Abbey of Nogent, founded another abbey at Prémontré nearby, and died in bed in 1130. He had been married three times. Abbot Guibert thought him “the wickedest man of his generation.”

  What formed a man like Thomas de Marie was not necessarily aggressive genes or father-hatred, which can occur in any century, but a habit of violence that flourished because of a lack of any organ of effective restraint.

  While political power centralized during the 12th and 13th centuries, the energies and talents of Europe were gathering in one of civilization’s great bursts of development. Stimulated by commerce, a surge took place in art, technology, building, learning, exploration by land and sea, universities, cities, banking and credit, and every sphere that enriched life and widened horizons. Those 200 years were the High Middle Ages, a period that brought into use the compass
and mechanical clock, the spinning wheel and treadle loom, the windmill and watermill; a period when Marco Polo traveled to China and Thomas Aquinas set himself to organize knowledge, when universities were established at Paris, Bologna, Padua, and Naples, Oxford and Cambridge, Salamanca and Valladolid, Montpellier and Toulouse; when Giotto painted human feeling, Roger Bacon delved into experimental science, Dante framed his great design of human fate and wrote it in the vernacular; a period when religion was expressed both in the gentle preaching of St. Francis and in the cruelty of the Inquisition, when the Albigensian Crusade in the name of faith drenched southern France in blood and massacre while the soaring cathedrals rose arch upon arch, triumphs of creativity, technology, and faith.

  They were not built by slave labor. Though limited serfdom existed, the rights and duties of serfs were fixed by custom and legal memory, and the work of medieval society, unlike that of the ancient world, was done by its own members.

  At Coucy after the death of Thomas, a sixty-year period of more respectable lordship followed under his son and grandson, Enguerrand II and Raoul I, who cooperated with the crown to the benefit of their domain. Each responded to the renewed crusades of the 12th century, and each in turn lost his life in the Holy Land. Perhaps suffering from financial stringency imposed by these expeditions, the widow of Raoul sold to Coucy-le-Château in 1197 its charter of liberties as a free commune for 140 livres.

  Such democratization, as far as it went, was not so much a step in a steady march toward liberty—as 19th century historians liked to envision the human record—as it was the inadvertent by-product of the nobles’ passionate pursuit of war. Required to equip himself and his retainers with arms, armor, and sound horses, all of them costly, the crusader—if he survived—usually came home poorer than he went, or left his estate poorer, especially since none of the crusades after the First was either victorious or lucrative. The only recourse, since it was unthinkable to sell land, was to sell communal privileges or commute labor services and bonds of serfdom for a money rent. In the expanding economy of the 12th and 13th centuries, the profits of commerce and agricultural surplus brought burghers and peasants the cash to pay for rights and liberties.

  In Enguerrand III, called “the Great,” builder of the reconstructed castle and donjon, the excess of the Coucys appeared again. Seigneur from 1191 to 1242, he built or reconstructed castles and ramparts on six of his fiefs in addition to Coucy, including one at St. Gobain almost as large as that of Coucy. He took part in the slaughter of the Albigensian Crusade, fought in every other available war including, like his great-grandfather Thomas, one against the diocese of Reims growing out of a quarrel over feudal rights. He was accused of having pillaged its lands, cut down its trees, seized its villages, forced the doors of the cathedral, imprisoned the doyen in chains, and reduced the canons to misery.

  When the Archbishop of Reims complained to the Pope in 1216, Enguerrand III too was excommunicated and all religious services in the diocese were ordered to be terminated if he should appear. A person under the ban was deprived of the sacraments and doomed to hell until such time as he made amendment and was absolved. In major cases only the bishop or in some cases the Pope could lift the ban. While it was in force the local priest was supposed to pronounce the curse upon the sinner before the parish two or three times a year in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Virgin Mary, and all the Apostles and saints while the funeral knell tolled, candles were put out, and the cross and missals laid on the floor. Supposedly the guilty one was cut off from all social and occupational relationships, but the inconveniences for everyone resulting from this rule were such that his neighbors either resorted to throwing stones at his house or other measures to bring him to repentance, or ignored the ban. In Enguerrand III’s case the cessation of all religious services was a fearful sentence upon the community, which brought him to settlement and absolution in 1219 after he had performed penance. But it did nothing to quench his civil ambitions, for he went on to build the great castle that cast its shadow over Paris.

  His urgency in the construction was stimulated by expectation of a battle with his sovereign, for during the minority of Louis IX, the future St. Louis, Enguerrand III led a league of barons in opposition to the crown; even, as some say, aspired to the throne himself. He had inherited royal blood through his mother, Alix de Dreux, a descendant of Philip I. His donjon, designed to surpass the royal tower of the Louvre, was taken as a gesture of defiance and intent. The regency of the boy King’s mother withstood the threat, but the Sire de Coucy remained a force to reckon with. He piled on property and international standing through marriages. His first and third wives were women of neighboring noble families who brought him additional estates in Picardy, and his second wife was Mahaut de Saxe, daughter of Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, granddaughter of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, niece of Richard the Lion-hearted, and sister of Otto of Saxony, subsequently Holy Roman Emperor. His daughter by one of these wives married Alexander II, King of Scotland.

  In the constructions at Coucy he employed (as estimated from masons’ marks) about 800 stonemasons, uncounted oxcarts to drag the stones from quarries to the hill, and some 800 other craftsmen such as carpenters, roofers, iron and lead workers, painters, and wood-carvers. Over the doorway of the donjon was carved in bas-relief the statue of an unarmored knight in combat with a lion, symbolizing chivalric courage. Walls of both castle and keep were decorated with painted borders and garlands of fantastic leaves, all on a scale to match the structure. Manteled chimneys, built into the walls, were a feature in every part of the castle. As distinct from a hole in the roof, these chimneys were a technological advance of the 11th century that by warming individual rooms, brought lords and ladies out of the common hall where all had once eaten together and gathered for warmth, and separated owners from their retainers. No other invention brought more progress in comfort and refinement, although at the cost of a widening social gulf.

  Tucked into an interior angle of the second story was a small room with its own chimney, perhaps a boudoir for the Dame de Coucy, where from the window she could see a view stretching over the valley with here and there the bell tower of a village church poking up behind a clump of trees, and where, like the lady of Shalott, she could watch the people come and go on the road winding up from below. Except for this tiny chamber, the living quarters of the seigneur and his family were in that part of the castle least accessible from outside.

  In 1206 the citizens of Amiens, Picardy’s proud and prosperous capital, already a commune for a hundred years, acquired a piece of John the Baptist’s head. As a fitting shrine for the relic, they determined to build the largest church in France, “higher than all the saints, higher than all the kings.” By 1220, resources having been gathered, the noble vault of the cathedral was steadily rising. Within the same decade Enguerrand III built, alongside his donjon, a grandiose and magnificent chapel, larger than the Sainte Chapelle that St. Louis was to build in Paris a few years later. Vaulted and gilded and rich in carving and color, it glowed with stained-glass windows so beautiful that the greatest collector of the next century, Jean, Duc de Berry, tried to buy them for 12,000 gold écus.

  Enguerrand III was now seigneur of St. Gobain, of Assis, of Marie, of La Fère, of Folembray, of Montmirail, of Oisy, of Crèvecoeur, of La Ferté-Aucoul and La Ferté-Gauche, Viscount of Meaux, Castellan de Cambrai. Long ago in 1095 the crown had retrieved sovereignty over the fief of Coucy from the Church; it was now held directly of the King, and its seigneur paid homage only to the King’s person. During the 12th and 13th centuries the seigneur of Coucy, like the Bishop of Laon, coined his own money. Judged by the number of knights that royal vassals were obligated to provide at the King’s summons, Coucy at this time was the leading untitled barony of the realm, ranking immediately behind the great dukedoms and counties which, except for homage owed to the French King, were virtually independent lordships. According to a record of 1216, the domain of Cou
cy owed 30 knights, in comparison to 34 for the Duke of Anjou, 36 for the Duke of Brittany, and 47 for the Count of Flanders.

  In 1242 Enguerrand III was killed at the age of about sixty when in a violent fall from his horse the point of his sword was thrust through his body. His eldest son and successor, Raoul II, was soon afterward killed in battle in Egypt while on St. Louis’ unhappy crusade of 1248–50. He was succeeded by his brother Enguerrand IV, a kind of medieval Caligula, one of whose crimes became the catalyst of a major advance in social justice.

  On apprehending in his forest three young squires of Laon, equipped with bows and arrows but no hunting dogs for taking important game, Enguerrand IV had them executed by hanging, without trial or process of any kind. Impunity in such affairs was no longer a matter of course, for the King was Louis IX, a sovereign whose sense of rulership was equal to his piety. He had Enguerrand IV arrested, not by his peers but by sergents of the court, like any criminal, and imprisoned in the Louvre, although, in deference to his rank, not in chains.

  Summoned to trial in 1256, Enguerrand IV was accompanied by the greatest peers of the realm—the King of Navarre, the Duke of Burgundy, the Counts of Bar and Soissons among others, grimly sensing a test of their prerogatives. Refusing to submit to investigation of the case as touching his person, honor, rank, and noble heritage, Enguerrand demanded judgment by his peers and trial by combat. Louis IX firmly refused, saying that as regards the poor, the clergy, “and persons who deserve our pity,” it would be unjust to allow trial by combat. Customarily, non-nobles could engage a champion in such cases, but King Louis saw the method as obsolete. In a long and fiercely argued process, against the strenuous resistance of the peers, he ordered the Sire de Coucy to stand trial. Enguerrand IV was convicted, and although the King intended a death sentence, he was persuaded by the peers to forgo it. Enguerrand was sentenced to pay a fine of 12,000 livres, to be used partly to endow masses in perpetuity for the souls of the men he had hanged, and partly to be sent to Acre to aid in the defense of the Holy Land. Legal history was made and later cited as a factor in the canonization of the King.