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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