A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [164]
Pessimism was a normal tone of the Middle Ages, because man was understood to be born doomed and requiring salvation, but it became more pervasive, and speculation about the coming of Anti-Christ more intense, in the second half of the century. Speculatores or scouts existed, it was believed, who watched for signs that would tell of the coming of “last things.” The end was awaited both in dread and in hope, for Anti-Christ would finally be defeated at Armageddon, ushering in the reign of Christ and a new age.
* His name was Giovanni or Gian Galeazzo, but the shorter form is used to distinguish him from his son, Gian Galeazzo the younger.
* With a paste of powdered egg yolk, saffron, and flour sometimes mixed with real gold leaf.
Chapter 12
Double Allegiance
As events moved toward the re-opening of war between France and England, Enguerrand was caught by his English marriage on the prongs of a forked allegiance. He could neither take up arms against his father-in-law, to whom he owed fealty for his English lands, nor, on the other hand, fight against his natural liege lord, the King of France.
King Charles was pressing hard on the issue of sovereignty raised by the Gascon lords. Taking pains to prepare an elaborate justification for resuming hostilities, the King asked for legal opinions from eminent jurists of the universities of Bologna, Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orléans, who not surprisingly returned favorable replies. Draped in the law, Charles summoned the Black Prince to Paris to answer the complaints against him. “Fiercely beholding” the messengers, the Prince fittingly replied that he would gladly come, “but I assure you that it will be with helmet on our head and 60,000 men in our company.” Thereupon Charles promptly proclaimed him a disloyal vassal, pronounced the Treaty of Brétigny void, and declared war as of May 1369.
As this situation developed, lords who held lands of both kings “were sore troubled in their myndes … and specially the lorde of Coucy, for it touched him gretly.” In the awkward predicament of owing allegiance to two lords at war with each other, a vassal, according to Bonet, should render his military service to the lord of his first oath and send a substitute to fight for the other—an ingenious but expensive solution. Coucy could not be compelled by King Edward to fight against his natural liege, but it was clear enough that if he fought for France, his great holdings as Earl of Bedford, and possibly Isabella’s too, would be confiscated.
His first plan was to leave in pursuit of a Hapsburg inheritance from his mother which lay across the Jura on the Swiss side of Alsace and had been withheld from him by his cousins Albert III and Leopold III, Dukes of Austria. Although Coucy’s claim has been disputed and the circumstances are confused, he himself clearly had no doubts of his right. His seal of 1369 bears a shield quartered with the arms of Austria in the same fashion that Edward quartered his arms with those of France to represent his claim to the French crown. Faceless and barely two inches high, the tiny figure on the seal expressed by its unusual stance the same haughtiness as the Coucy motto. Unlike the typical noble’s seal of a galloping knight with upraised sword, the Coucy figure stands erect, in mail with closed visor, austere and stern, holding in its right hand a lance planted on the ground and in its left the shield. Such a standing figure, rarely used, implied regency or royal descent, and appeared in Coucy’s time on the arms of the Dukes of Anjou, Berry, and Bourbon. In one form or another, sometimes with a crest of plumes descending upon the shoulders, the upright immobile figure remained on Coucy’s seals throughout his lifetime.
With a small body of knights and mixed Picard-Breton-Norman men-at-arms, Coucy entered Alsace in imperial territory in September 1369. At about this time Isabella returned