A Distant Mirror (44 page)

In further enlargement of his fortune, Enguerrand now acquired the equivalent of an earldom in France, helped thereto by the not disinterested hand of his father-in-law. A fellow hostage, and neighbor in France, was Guy de Blois et de Châtillon, Count of Soissons, a nephew of both Philip VI and Charles de Blois of Brittany, who despite his great family and connections, had so far been unable to buy his liberty. As the price of his release, an arrangement was now reached by which, with the consent of King Charles of France, he ceded his county of Soissons to Edward, who in turn presented it to Coucy in lieu of the £4,000 provided by Isabella’s dowry. The great domains of Coucy and Soissons, constituting a sizable portion of Picardy, were now joined in the hands of a son-in-law of the King of England. With a territorial title diluting the once proud austerity of the Coucy motto, Enguerrand was now Count of Soissons, and as such returned with his wife and daughters to France in July 1367.

Chapter 10

I
n the seven years of Coucy’s absence in England, the havoc wrought by the Free Companies, spreading through France, Savoy, Lombardy, and the papal dominions, had become a major fact of European affairs. Not a passing phenomenon nor an external force, the companies had become a way of life, a part of society itself, used and joined by its rulers even as they struggled to throw them off. They ate at society from within like Erysichthon, the “tearer up of earth,” who, having destroyed the trees in the sacred grove of Demeter, was cursed by the goddess with an insatiable appetite and finally devoured himself attempting to satisfy his hunger.

Discipline and organization made the companies more useful as fighting forces than knights bent on glory and unacquainted with the principle of command. Rulers employed them, as when Amadeus VI, Count of Savoy, contracted with
one of the worst of the captains to crush the partisans of an opponent by use of terrorism within his own dominions. Whether employed or living by adventure, they made pillage pay the cost. Life by the sword became subordinate to its means; the means became the end; the climate of the 14th century succumbed to the brute triumph of the lawless.

In France during the transfer of territories, despite the renewed orders of King Edward, many bands refused to demobilize or evacuate their fortresses. Discharged from regular employment, like bees from a broken hive, they created small hives around a particular captain and joined the host of
Tard-Venus
. Finding mercenary employment combined with brigandage profitable, they spread, attracting into their ranks those who quickly relapse into lawlessness when the social contract breaks down. While the lower ranks came from the debris of town and country and from the cast-offs of every occupation including the Church, the leaders came from the top—lords who found a life of gain by the sword irresistible, or losers of the knightly class whom the companies themselves had uprooted. Unable to live adequately off
ruined lands, they joined the mercenaries rather than follow a life without the sword. “Unbridled in every kind of cruelty,” in the words of the Pope’s excommunication in 1364, they seemed to defenseless people like another plague, to be attributed to the planets or God’s wrath.

In France they were called
écorcheurs
(skinners) and
routiers
(highwaymen), in Italy
condottieri
from the
condotta
or contract that fixed the terms of their employment as mercenaries. They extorted a systematized income from vulnerable towns in the form of
appatis
, a forced tribute to buy freedom from attack, of which the terms were put in writing by clerks. They drew into their service from ordinary life notaries, lawyers, and bankers to handle their affairs, as well as clerks, blacksmiths, tanners, coopers, butchers, surgeons, priests, tailors, laundresses, prostitutes, and often their own legal wives. They dealt through regular brokers who sold their plunder, except for particular arms or luxuries they wished to keep, such as jewels and women’s gowns or steel for swords or, in one case, ostrich plumes and beaver hats. They became installed in the social structure. When Burgundy was occupied by the “Archpriest” Arnaut de Cervole in 1364, young Duke Philip treated him with respect, calling him his adviser and companion, and making over to him a castle and several noble hostages as security until he could raise 2,500 gold francs to buy his departure. To raise the sum, Philip adopted the usual expedient of taxing his subjects, another cause of bitterness against the lords.

Bertucat d’Albret, of the same family as Isabella’s rejected bridegroom, was one of the notable great lords who were more
pillard
than seigneur. Years later, in old age, he sighed for the days “when we would leap upon rich merchants from Toulouse or La Riolle or Bergerac. Never did a day fail to bring us some fine prize for our enrichment and good cheer.” His friend and fellow Gascon, Seguin de Badefol, often called “King of the Companies,” replaced the five hats in his father’s coat-of-arms with five bezants, or gold coins, indicating his major interest. Aimerigot Marcel, who after thirty years as a brigand was to end on the scaffold, boasted of his takings in silks from Brussels, skins from the fairs, spices coming from Bruges, rich fabrics from Damascus and Alexandria. “All was ours or ransomed at our will.… The peasants of Auvergne supplied us in our castle, bringing wheat and flour and fresh bread, hay for the horses, good wine, beef and mutton, fat lambs and poultry. We were provisioned like kings. And when we rode forth the country trembled before us.”

Popular hatred credited the companies with every crime from eating meat in Lent to committing atrocities upon pregnant women which
caused death to unborn and unbaptized children. Three quarters of France was their prey, especially the wine-growing areas of Burgundy, Normandy, Champagne, and Languedoc. Walled towns could organize resistance, turning back the violence upon the countryside, which was repeatedly devastated, creating a vagabond population of destitute peasants, artisans seeking work, priests without parishes.

The companies did not spare churches. “Insensible to the fear of God,” wrote
Innocent VI in a pastoral letter of 1360, “the sons of iniquity … invade and wreck churches, steal their books, chalices, crosses, relics and vessels of the divine ritual and make them their booty.” Churches where blood had been spilled in combat were considered profaned and prohibited from sacramental use until they had gone through a long bureaucratic process of reconciliation. Nevertheless, papal taxes continued, and incumbents of ruined benefices were often reduced to penury, and deserted, not infrequently to join their persecutors. “See how grave it has become,” mourned Innocent in the same letter, “when those charged with divine grace … participate in rapine and despoliation, even in the shedding of blood.”

With clergy and knights joining the sons of iniquity, the average man felt himself living in an age of rapine and powerless to control it. “If God Himself were a soldier, He would be a robber,” said an English knight named Talbot.

One chain still held: the necessity of absolution. Fear of dying without it was so ingrained that ghosts were believed to be the souls of the unshriven who had returned to seek absolution for their sins in life. No matter how far the brigands had separated themselves from other rules, they insisted on the formula if not the substance of forgiveness. In theory a man who met death in a “just war” would go straight to Heaven if he had repented of his sins, but a knight guilty of the sin of rapine would have to prove penitence by restitution of his gains. Making no pretense of just war, much less given to restitution, the companies were content to extort absolution by force, like a bag of gold. When negotiating ransoms or quittances with their captives, even those they had maimed or tortured, they would make it a condition of release that the victims solicit absolution for them or urge the Pope to lift his excommunication.

Innocent’s successor, Urban V, issued two Bulls of Excommunication in 1364,
Cogit Nos
and
Miserabilis Nonullorum
, which were supposed to have the effect of prohibiting any cooperation with or provisioning of the companies, and which offered plenary indulgence to all who died in combatting them. If the ban disturbed the brigands, it did not restrain them.

The outstanding professional among the
Tard-Venus
, one whom Coucy was destined to meet in combat, was Sir John
Hawkwood, who first appeared by name as leader of one of the companies besieging Avignon in 1361. His origin was the kind that sent many into the companies. As the second son of a minor landowner and tanner by trade, he left home when his elder brother inherited the manor along with £10, six horses, and a cart, leaving the younger son landless with a portion of £20 10s. Listed among the English army in France in the 1350s, Hawkwood was “still a poor knight who had gained nothing but his spurs” when he joined the
Tard-Venus
after Brétigny. He was then about 35. By the time he was diverted by papal gold from Avignon to Italy, he commanded the White Company of 3,500 mounted men and 2,000 foot whose white flags and tunics and highly polished breastplates gave the company its name. On their first appearance in Lombardy they spread terror by their fury and license, and as time went on, “nothing was more terrible to hear than the name of the English.” They gained the reputation of
perfidi e scelleratissimi
(perfidious and most wicked), although it was conceded that “they did not roast and mutilate their victims like the Hungarians.”

Hired by one or another of the Italian city-states in their chronic wars, Hawkwood could soon command the highest price for his services. However ruthless his methods—and they inspired the proverb “
an Italianized Englishman is a devil incarnate”—he spent no time on mere brigandage, but contracted his company to whatever power had the capacity to pay, on either side in any war. He fought for Pisa against Florence and vice versa, for the papal forces against the Visconti and vice versa, and on leaving the service of the Visconti, correctly turned back to Galeazzo the castles the White Company had conquered. War was business to Hawkwood, provided that his contracts exempted him from fighting against the King of England. When he died after 35 years in Italy, rich in lands, pensions, and renown, he was buried in the cathedral of Florence and commemorated by Uccello’s equestrian fresco over the door. National pride in the year of his death reclaimed him; at the personal request of Richard II, his body was returned to England for burial in his native town.

In Italy the companies were used virtually as official armies in public wars. In France they were out of control. The only effective counter-force would have been a permanent army, which was not yet within the vision of the state nor within its financial capacity. The only feasible strategy against the companies was to pay them to go somewhere else. Since the King of Hungary was appealing for help against
the Turks, a concerted effort to drain off the menace in a crusade was made in 1365 by the Pope, the Emperor, and the King of France.

The person nominated by the former Regent, now Charles V, to lead the crusade was a strange new captain as rough as his Breton name, which the French rendered De Clequin or Kaisquin or Clesquy until fame settled on Bertrand Du Guesclin. Flat-nosed, dark-skinned, short, and heavy, “there was none so ugly from Rennes to Dinant.” So begins Cuvelier’s rhymed epic designed to create a French hero to rival Chandos Herald’s panegyric of the Black Prince. “Wherefore his parents hated him so sore that often in their hearts they wished him dead. Rascal, Fool, or Clown they were wont to call him; so despised was he as an ill-conditioned child that squires and servants made light of him.” The parents were poor nobility. The uncouth son, unspoiled by tournaments, learned to fight in the guerrilla warfare of Brittany in the service of Charles of Blois, becoming skilled in the tactics of ambush and ruse, the use of disguise, spies, secret messengers, smoke clouds to hide movements, bribes of money and wine, torture and killing of prisoners, and surprise attacks launched during the “Truce of God.” He was intrepid as he was unscrupulous, fierce with the sword but ever ready to use stratagem; hard, tricky, and ruthless as any
écorcheur
.

Born between 1315 and 1320, he did not become a knight until he was over 35 and had won local renown in the defense of Rennes. His bold capture of a fortress from the Navarrese, witnessed by the Regent, began his prominence in the royal service. Though Charles V was not a fighter himself, he had a fighting purpose. Through all the years since the Treaty of Brétigny, his single silent overriding aim was to frustrate the renunciations of territory that would have dismembered the realm. Having no wish to lead a host in battle, he knew he needed a military leader, and found one in this “hog in armor,” the first effective commander comparable to the Black Prince or Sir John Chandos to appear on the French side.

In 1364, the opening year of Charles’s reign, Du Guesclin led the French to victory, then defeat, in two historic battles. In the first at Cocherel in Normandy against the forces of Charles of Navarre, the numbers were small but the outcome was large, for it led to the elimination of Navarre’s chronic threat to Paris. The battle was even more notable for the capture of Navarre’s cousin, the Captal de Buch, whom Charles afterward liberated without asking ransom in the hope of winning over this heart of turbulence to the French side. The second battle five months later, at Auray on the rocky Breton coast, was decisive for the war in Brittany. Charles of Blois, the French candidate for the dukedom, was killed and Du Guesclin taken prisoner. This was the last
clash of the rival Dukes of Brittany, leaving the English candidate, Jean de Montfort, in possession, although by the terms of the Treaty of Brétigny the dukedom remained a French fief. The defeat was in fact turned by Charles V into a source of advantage. By means of a huge pension, he persuaded Blois’s widow to yield her claim, thus ending the running war and the bleeding of French strength. Charles V was one who preferred not to fight where he could buy.