A Distant Mirror (52 page)

Following Edward’s aborted expedition, the English made one more
effort. A new army was assembled which probably numbered about 4,000 to 5,000 men despite the chroniclers’ “10,000” and “15,000.” Led by John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, without his father or elder brother, both now unfit for war, the army crossed to Calais in July 1373 with the stated purpose of marching to the relief of Aquitaine. It was the longest and strangest march of the war.

Although supposedly seeking decisive battle, in which the English usually prevailed, Lancaster did not take the direct route southward, where he would have encountered Du Guesclin’s forces on the way. Instead he took the long way around, behind Paris, in a protracted raid of pillage that led down through Champagne and Burgundy, across the central highlands of Auvergne, and eventually, after five months and almost 1,000 miles, to Aquitaine. Probably the intention of the famous, if indirect, offensive was to spread damage like Knollys, with the added purpose of distracting the French from organizing a possible invasion of England. Perhaps Lancaster simply wanted a wider opportunity to find knightly adventure and the plunder necessary to make up the pay which the state could not furnish.

Covering eight or nine miles a day in the usual three lines of march, the better to live off the country and gather loot, the army inflicted wanton damage in order to provoke, through the complaints of the inhabitants, the combat of French knights. This failed, owing to Charles’s strict prohibition and because the population was encouraged to take refuge inside fortified towns. Lancaster’s march stretched out into the cold and rains of autumn; provisions dwindled, horses starved and died, discomfort grew into hardship and hardship into privation. The Duke of Burgundy’s men, following on the army’s heels, picked off stragglers, local resistance accounted for more losses, in the south Du Guesclin laid ambushes. November was met on the wind-swept shelterless plateau of Auvergne, knights without horses plodded on foot, some discarded rusted armor, some as they entered Aquitaine were seen to beg their bread. Of the wasted army that stumbled into Bordeaux at Christmastime, half the men and almost all the horses had perished.

Enough were left to hold the old Aquitaine, now reduced to its original boundaries, but not to regain what had been lost. By 1374 the Treaty of Brétigny had been nullified in fact as well as name. Except for Calais, England was left with no more than she had held before Crécy. The English had no way of holding territory without the financial means to maintain an army abroad nor, once war had broken out, could they hold ceded regions whose population had become hostile.
Nor could military superiority conquer an opponent who refused decisive battle. In August 1374 King Edward declared his readiness to conclude a truce.

For both sides the time had come. Charles V, by using his head, and Du Guesclin, by his unorthodox tactics, had combined to forge a strategy based on recognition of the possible—the direct antithesis of combat for honor, chivalry’s central principle. While contemporary chroniclers and propagandists tried to make of Du Guesclin the “Tenth Worthy” and Perfect Knight, and Charles’s biographer Christine de Pisan insisted on eulogizing him for everything but his real contribution, it was in truth the non-chivalric qualities of these two hard-headed characters that brought France back from ruin. Charles had succeeded in his war aim, but at the cost of a ravaged and exhausted country. After some stalling, he agreed to send envoys to a peace parley at Bruges.

Chapter 13

N
o peace treaty was reached at Bruges because the English were determined to retain their former possessions in France under their own sovereignty, while Charles V was equally determined to regain the sovereignty of Guienne yielded at Brétigny. His lawyers argued that the yielding of sovereignty had been invalid because it violated the sacred oath of homage, therefore the Black Prince and the King of England had been guilty of rebellion comparable to that of Lucifer against God. While this satisfied Charles’s life-long care to exhibit a lawful case, it failed to impress the English. To avoid total waste of the parley, which had been conducted at great expense and rival magnificence by the Dukes of Burgundy and Lancaster (Burgundy received 5,000 francs a month in expenses), a one year’s truce beginning in June 1375 was agreed upon, with an undertaking to resume negotiations in November.

Left unemployed by the truce, the companies in France reverted to plundering the people they had lately liberated. More than a year earlier, in January 1374, the royal government had attempted by a sweeping ordinance to bring the units under control. The ordinance provided for a system of authorized companies at fixed rates of pay under captains appointed by the crown who would be required to forswear pillage and be held responsible, under pain of stated penalties, for the conduct of their men. It was a conscientious effort, but the Free Companies proved too much a part of the military system to be either uprooted or domesticated. Their brigandage continued.

“Greatly troubled” by this situation, the King took counsel with his advisers on what he might do. They “bethought them of the Sire de Coucy.” He was to be a new Pied Piper who could lead the brigands out of France in a foreign war—his own.

Coucy’s case against the Dukes of Austria and his determination to pursue it were well known. He could serve France in this matter,
unhindered by his ties to England. The proposal was put to him by Bureau de la Rivière and Jean le Mercier, the King’s Chamberlain and Treasurer, that if he would take into his service the companies of some 25 captains from many parts of France and lead them against the Hapsburg Dukes, the King would provide 60,000 livres toward their pay and the expenses of the compaign. Especially he was to remove the hard-bitten Bretons, followers of Du Guesclin and Clisson, who had been committing terrible ravages since the end of official war.

Coucy’s experience of mercenaries in Lombardy was enough to teach him the dangers and undependability of such a command, even though it promised him extraordinary aid toward his own purpose. He was now 35, rich enough to loan money in that year to the Duc de Berry but not to finance a campaign against the Hapsburgs out of his own resources. He agreed to undertake the great riddance.

Among the captains recruited to Coucy’s banner were the Constable’s brother, Olivier du Guesclin, who had been occupying and devastating the lands of the Duc de Berry, and his cousin Sylvestre Budes, chief of a Breton company which had been the bane of the Pope and the scourge of Avignon, where it plundered even the wheat sent by the King to relieve a famine in 1375. In vain the Pope had pleaded, negotiated, paid, excommunicated. He now paid the Bretons 5,000 francs and agreed to revoke the excommunication if they would go with Coucy. “Great terror” spread through Burgundy as they moved northward up the left bank of the Rhône; runners reported their advance, towns and villages sent out heralds to recruit help. Like fierce summer locusts, the Bretons, joined by other companies, swept through Champagne in July, into Lorraine in August, and into Alsace, which was part of the Hapsburg domain within the Empire, in September.

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.