A Distant Mirror (47 page)

Thirty years old in 1368, two years older than Enguerrand de Coucy, the King was pale, thin, and grave, with a long sinuous prominent nose, sharp eyes, thin closed lips, sandy hair, and carefully controlled feelings. Through a hard school, he had learned to keep his thoughts to himself, so that he was accused of being subtle and secret. He had recovered from the severe headaches, toothaches, dyspepsia, and other ailments which afflicted him during his regency, but still suffered from a malady—perhaps gout—of the right hand or arm and a mysterious fistula and abscess of the left arm, probably from tuberculosis, but supposed to be the result of the attempt by Charles of Navarre to poison him in 1358. A learned physician from Prague, sent to him by his uncle the Emperor, treated the poison, but told him that if ever the abscess should cease oozing, Charles would die after fifteen days in which he would have time to settle his affairs and attend to his soul. Not surprisingly, the King lived under a sense of urgency.

As a man of inquiring mind, interested in cause and effect, and in philosophy, science, and literature, he formed one of the great libraries of his age, which was installed in the Louvre, where he maintained a second residence. The library’s rooms were paneled in carved and decorated cypress, stained-glass windows were screened by iron wire against “birds and other beasts,” and a silver lamp was kept burning all night so that the King could read at any time. Not knowledge only but the spread of knowledge concerned him. He commissioned Nicolas Oresme, a learned councillor of advanced and scientific mind, to explain the theory of stable currency in simple language; it was this kind of statecraft that earned him the title of Charles le Sage (the Wise). He commissioned translations into French of Livy, Aristotle, and Augustine’s
City of God
“for the public utility of the realm and all Christendom,” and owned many other classics, works of the church fathers, and Arab scientific treatises in French translation. The library was eclectic, ranging from Euclid, Ovid, Seneca, and Josephus to John of Salisbury, the
Roman de la Rose
, and a then current best seller, Sir John Mandeville’s
Travels
. It contained the various 13th century encyclopedias of universal knowledge, a collection of works on the crusades and on astrology and astronomy, 47 Arthurian and other romances, codes, commentaries and grammars, works of philosophy, theology, contemporary poetry, and satire—in all, according to an inventory of 1373, over 1,000 volumes, ultimately the nucleus of the national library
of France. When reproached for spending too much time with books and clerks, Charles answered, “As long as knowledge is honored in this country, so long will it prosper.”

His three brothers were all compulsively acquisitive: Louis d’Anjou, eldest of the three, for money and a kingdom; Jean de Berry for art; Philip of Burgundy for power. Tall, robust, and blond like his father, Anjou was headstrong, vain, and driven by insatiable ambition. Berry, sensual and pleasure-loving, was the supreme collector, whose square common pug-nosed face and thick body consorted oddly with his love of art. Philip of Burgundy had Berry’s coarse heavy features but greater intelligence and an overweening pride. Each put his own interests above the kingdom’s, each was given to conspicuous consumption to enhance and display his prestige, and each was to produce through his patronage works of art unsurpassed of their kind: the Apocalypse series of tapestries made for Anjou, the
Très Riches Heures
and
Belles Heures
illuminated for Berry by the brothers Limbourg, and the statues of the Well of Moses and the Mourners sculpted by Claus Sluter for Burgundy.

Never did princely magnificence display itself more noticeably than on two occasions in 1368–69 in which Coucy shared. His brother-in-law, Lionel, Duke of Clarence, a widower and father at 29, came to Paris in April 1368 on his way to Milan to marry Violante Visconti, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Galeazzo.
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Accompanied by a retinue of 457 persons and 1,280 horses (perhaps the extras were for gifts), he was lodged in a suite especially decorated for him at the Louvre. His sister, the Dame de Coucy, and Enguerrand came to Paris to meet him and to join in the feasts and honors with which the King and his brothers during the next two days overwhelmed their late enemy.

Another conspicuous guest was Enguerrand’s cousin and the bride’s uncle Amadeus VI of Savoy, called “the Green Count” from the occasion of his knighthood at nineteen when he had appeared in a series of tournaments wearing green plumes, green silk tunic over his armor, green caparisons on his horse, and followed by eleven knights all in green, each led into the lists by a lady in green leading her champion’s horse by a green cord. Amadeus yielded to no one in ostentation. While in Paris, where the shops were displaying their finest goods for the occasion, the Green Count enjoyed a shopping spree, leaving orders for jeweled necklaces, table knives, boots, shoes, plumes, spurs, and straw hats. He gave the King a “chapel” of rubies and large pearls costing 1,000 florins and bestowed three gold francs on Guillaume
de Machaut for a romance presented to him by the poet. He took home to his wife four lengths of cloth of Reims costing 60 francs and a
jaquette
lined with 1,200 squirrel skins.

Dinners and suppers, dancing and games at St. Pol and the Louvre crowded Clarence’s visit, including an elaborate banquet which cost the Duke of Burgundy 1,556 livres. All the abundant species of game, fish, and fowl then inhabiting the woods and rivers, as well as domestic meats especially fattened for the table, were available for eating. Forty kinds of fish and thirty different roasts appear among the recipes of the time. On Clarence’s departure the King presented him and his suite with gifts valued at “20,000” florins, part of a routine of gift-giving that, besides exhibiting the status of the giver, was useful to the receiver, who could turn the gifts into cash by pawning.

The acme of ostentation awaited in Milan. To have bought a daughter of the King of France for his son and now a son of the King of England for his daughter was a double triumph for Galeazzo Visconti and one more marvel in the notoriety of the Vipers of Milan, so called from the family device of a serpent swallowing a struggling human figure, supposedly a Saracen. Two Visconti ruled jointly in Lombardy—Galeazzo and his more terrible brother, Bernabò. Murder, cruelty, avarice, effective government alternating with savage despotism, respect for learning and encouragement of the arts, and lusts amounting to sexual mania characterized one or another of the family. Lucchino, an immediate predecessor, had been murdered by his wife, who, after a notable orgy on a river barge during which she entertained several lovers at once including the Doge of Venice and her own nephew Galeazzo, decided to eliminate her husband to forestall his same intention with regard to her. The debaucheries of Matteo, eldest brother of Bernabò and Galeazzo, were such that he endangered the regime and was disposed of by his brothers in 1355, the year after their accession, “dying like a dog without confession.”

War with the papacy, from which they had seized Bologna and other fiefs of the Holy See, was the Visconti’s major activity. When excommunicated by the Pope in the course of the war, Bernabò compelled the legate who brought him the Bull of Excommunication to eat it, including silken cord and seals of lead. He was supposed to have had four nuns burned and an Augustinian monk roasted alive in an iron cage for no known reason unless it was malice toward the Church.

Greedy, crafty, cruel, and ferocious, given to paroxysms of rage and macabre humor, Bernabò was the epitome of the unbridled aristocrat. If any of his 500 hunting dogs was not in good condition, he would have the keepers hanged and all poachers as well. The
Quaresima,
a forty-day program of torture attributed to Bernabò and his brother, supposedly issued as an edict on their accession, was a catalogue so lurid as to make one hope it was intended to frighten, rather than for actual use. With the
strappado
, the wheel, the rack, flaying, gouging of eyes, cutting off of facial features and limbs one by one, and a day of torture alternating with a day of rest, it was supposed to terminate in death for “traitors” and convicted enemies.

In his personal habits Bernabò was dedicated “to an astonishing degree to the vice of lust, so that his household appeared to be more the seraglio of a sultan than the habitation of a Christian prince.” He fathered seventeen children by his wife, Regina, said to be the only person who could approach him in his mad moods, and more than that number of illegitimate children by various mistresses. When Bernabò rode through the streets, all citizens were obliged to bend the knee; he would frequently say he was God on earth, Pope and Emperor in his own domain.

Bernabò ruled in
Milan, his brother Galeazzo in the ancient city of Pavia twenty miles away. More than 100 towers darkening Pavia’s narrow streets testified to the incessant strife of Italian towns. Galeazzo’s great square castle, just completed in 1365, was built into the northern wall of the town, overlooking gardens and fruitful countryside. Called by the chronicler Corio with patriotic pride “the first palace of the universe,” and by a later admirer “the finest dwelling place in Europe,” it was built of rose-red brick baked from Lombard clay, and boasted 100 windows surrounding a magnificent courtyard. Petrarch, who for eight years was an ornament of the Visconti court, described its crown of towers “rising to the clouds,” where “in one direction could be seen the snowy crest of the Alps and in the other the wooded Apennines.” On a balcony overlooking the moat, the family could dine in summer, refreshed by the sight of water and a view of gardens and forested park rich in game.

A less melodramatic tyrant than his brother, Galeazzo was sober in personal habits and devoted to his wife, the “good and gentle” Blanche of Savoy. He wore his red-gold hair long, in braids or loose, or “sometimes resting on his shoulders in a silken net or garlanded with flowers,” and he suffered grievously from gout—“the malady of the rich,” as it was called by the Count of Flanders, who suffered from it too.

The wedding of Lionel of England and Violante Visconti was to be held in Milan, leading city of Lombardy and inland rival of Venice and Genoa. As the center for trade below the Alps, it had dominated northern Italy for a thousand years. Its marvels, recorded by a friar of
the previous century, included 6,000 fountains for drinking water, 300 public ovens, ten hospitals of which the largest accommodated 1,000 patients two to a bed, 1,500 lawyers, forty copyists of documents, 10,000 monks of all orders, and 100 armorers manufacturing the famous Milanese armor. By mid-14th century it was subject to the general habit of deploring decadence in comparison with the good simple days of yore. Men were reproved for extravagant fashions, especially if foreign—tight garments “in the Spanish manner,” monstrous spurs like the Tatars’, adornment with pearls after the French fashion. Women were reproved for frizzled hair and gowns that bared their breasts. Milan had so many prostitutes, it was said, that Bernabò taxed them for revenue to maintain the city walls.

On arrival in Milan, Lionel was accompanied, in addition to his own suite, by 1,500 mercenaries of the White Company, which had switched from the Pope’s service to that of the Visconti. Eighty ladies all dressed alike—as was customary to enhance the pageantry of great occasions—in gold-embroidered scarlet gowns with white sleeves and gold belts, and sixty mounted knights and squires also uniformly dressed came in the train of Galeazzo to greet him. In addition to a dowry for his daughter so extensive that it took two years to negotiate, Galeazzo paid expenses of 10,000 florins a month for five and a half months for the bridegroom and his retinue.

The stupendous
wedding banquet, held outdoors in June, left all accounts gasping. Its obvious purpose was to testify to “the Largeness of Duke Galeas his soul, the full satisfaction he had in this match and the abundance of his coffers.” Thirty double courses of meat and fish alternated with presentation of gifts after each course. Under the direction of the bride’s brother, Gian Galeazzo the younger, now seventeen and father of a two-year-old daughter, the gifts were distributed among Lionel’s party according to rank. They consisted of costly coats of mail, plumed and crested helmets, armor for horses, surcoats embroidered with gems, greyhounds in velvet collars, falcons wearing silver bells, enameled bottles of the choicest wine, purple and golden cloth and cloaks trimmed with ermine and pearls, 76 horses including six beautiful little palfreys caparisoned in green velvet with crimson tassels, six great war-horses in crimson velvet with gold rosettes, and two others of extra quality named Lion and Abbott; also six fierce strong
daunts
or war-dogs, sometimes used with cauldrons of flaming pitch strapped to their backs, and twelve splendid fat oxen.

The meats and fish, all gilded,
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paired suckling pigs with crabs,
hares with pike, a whole calf with trout, quails and partridges with more trout, ducks and herons with carp, beef and capons with sturgeon, veal and capons with carp in lemon sauce, beef pies and cheese with eel pies, meat aspic with fish aspic, meat galantines with lamprey, and among the remaining courses, roasted kid, venison, peacocks with cabbage, French beans and pickled ox-tongue, junkets and cheese, cherries and other fruit. The leftover food brought away from the table, from which servants customarily made their meal, was enough, it was said, to feed a thousand men. Among those who shared the feast were Petrarch, an honored guest at the high table, and both Froissart and Chaucer among the company, although it is doubtful if the two young unknowns were introduced to the famous Italian laureate.

Never did Fortune’s Wheel come down with such a crash; never was vainglory so reprimanded. Four months later, while still in Italy, the Duke of Clarence died of an undiagnosed “fever,” which naturally raised cries of poison, although, since it destroyed the influential alliance that Galeazzo had bought at such enormous expense, the cause was more likely the delayed effect of all those gilded meats in the heat of the Lombardy summer. Violante’s fate was no happier. She was next married to a half-mad sadist, the seventeen-year-old Marquis of Montferrat, who was given to strangling boy servants with his own hands. After his violent death she married a first cousin, one of Bernabò’s sons, who came to a violent end at the hands of her brother. She died at 31, three times a widow.