A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [168]
In the same year, Amadeus of Savoy, the Green Count, entered Piedmont, where his territory adjoined Milan, in pursuit of a local war against one of his vassals. He was accompanied by his cousin Enguerrand de Coucy, whom he appointed his Lieutenant-General for Piedmont.
Enguerrand crossed the snowbound Alps with a company of 100 lances some time between November and March in the winter of 1371–72. Though impassable in the 20th century in winter, the alpine passes were negotiated in all seasons by medieval travelers, with the aid of Savoyard mountaineers as guides. People of the Middle Ages were less deterred by physical hazards than their more comfortable descendants. Monks of the local hospices and local villagers, exempted from taxes for their service, kept paths marked and strung ropes along the ridges. They guided parties of loaded mules and pulled travelers on the ramasse, a rough mattress made of boughs with ends tied together by a rope. Travelers wore snow goggles or hats and hoods cut like masks over their faces. A cardinal’s party with a train of 120 horses was seen crossing in one November with the horses’ eyelids closed by the freezing snow. The bodies of travelers overcome by storm, or who had failed to reach a hospice by nightfall, were regularly cleared away by the guides in spring.
From their trans-alpine perch, the Counts of Savoy exercised control of the passes with great effect. The Green Count, Amadeus VI, was a strong-willed enterprising prince whose father and Coucy’s maternal grandmother had been brother and sister. Seventeenth of his dynasty, brother-in-law of the Queen of France, founder of two orders of chivalry, leader of the crusade which had expelled the Turks from Gallipoli in 1365 and restored the Emperor of Byzantium to his throne, Amadeus despised mercenaries as “scoundrels” and “nobodies”—and hired them nonetheless. On occasion he was not above bribing them to betray their previous contracts. For operations in Piedmont against the Marquis of Saluzzo in 1371, he engaged the dreaded and brutal Anachino Baumgarten with his German-Hungarian company of 1,200 lances, 600 briganti, and 300 archers. In the face of this threat, Saluzzo turned for support to Bernabò Visconti, who sent him reinforcements.
At this point Coucy entered Piedmont as leader of the Savoyard campaign. Clearly well schooled in standard practice, Coucy is reported “wasting” Saluzzo’s territory and sending to Amadeus for more men so as to strip the country more effectively. These tactics, designed to induce surrender, rapidly succeeded. Coucy’s conquest of three towns and siege of a fourth provoked a counter-offensive by Bernabò in behalf of his ally. In reaction Amadeus joined the Papal League against the Visconti, to the extreme distress of his sister Blanche, who was married to Galeazzo Visconti. In recognition of the 1,000 lances Amadeus promised to engage at his own expense, the Pope named him Captain-General of the league forces in western Lombardy.
In the ensuing struggle, the parties were entangled in a web of relationships more important to themselves than to posterity. Connected by marriage or vassalage or treaty in one way or another, the belligerents shifted in and out of alliances and enmities like chess pieces playing a gigantic game, which may account for the strangely insubstantial nature of the fighting. The war was further conditioned by the use of mercenaries, who, having no loyalties at all, shifted overnight even more easily than their principals. The lord of Mantua started as a member of the league and abandoned the Pope to join Bernabò. Sir John Hawkwood, starting in the pay of Bernabò, abandoned him to join the league. The Marquis of Montferrat, heavily besieged by Galeazzo, subsequently married his daughter, the widowed Violante.