A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [12]
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,