A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [169]
At Asti, focus of the Savoyard campaign, Coucy found himself in August 1372 facing Sir John Hawkwood’s White Company, then in the pay of the Visconti. Each of Hawkwood’s men, as described by Villani, was served by one or two pages who kept his armor bright so that it “shone like a mirror and thus gave them a more terrifying appearance.” In combat their horses were held by the pages while the men-at-arms fought on foot in a compact round body with each lance, pointed low, held by two men. “With slow steps and terrible outcry, they advanced upon the enemy and very difficult it was to break or disunite them.” However, Villani adds, they did better at night raids on villages than in open combat, and when successful “it was more owing to the cowardice of our own men” than to the company’s valor or moral virtue.
Troubled by gout and having no taste anyway for personal combat, Galeazzo had sent his 21-year-old son in nominal command of the siege of Asti. Called the Count of Vertu from the title acquired by his childhood marriage to Isabelle of France, Gian Galeazzo was tall and well built with the reddish hair and striking good looks of his father, though his intellectual rather than his physical qualities were what impressed most observers. The only son of devoted parents, educated in statecraft but untried in war, the young Visconti, himself the father of three, was accompanied by two guardians under orders from his father and mother to keep him from being killed or captured, which, they noted, “are frequent events in war.” All too dutifully the guardians prevented Hawkwood from the frontal assault he wanted to make, causing him, in exasperation, to strike his tents and leave the camp. In consequence, the Savoyards were able to relieve the city. When Bernabò halved Hawkwood’s pay in penalty, he deserted to the papal forces. Shortly afterward Baumgarten, the Savoyard mercenary, deserted to the Visconti.
For the Savoyards, the relief of Asti, if something less than a brilliant military victory, opened the way for the march on Milan. Gian Galeazzo, returning without glory from his first essay in arms, came back to Pavia in time to be present at the death of his 23-year-old wife, Isabelle of France. She died in the birth of their fourth child, a son who survived her only seven months.
Enguerrand’s role at Asti, though not chronicled, must have been prominent and possibly decisive in some way, for the Pope immediately empowered his legate, the Cardinal of St. Eustache, “to contract and make treaties, alliances and agreements with Enguerrand, Lord of Coucy, on behalf of the Church,” with the object of giving him command of papal troops which the Cardinal was conducting to Lombardy. A first payment to Coucy of 5,893 florins was authorized through a banker of Florence, “to be received by hand,” on condition that if Coucy failed to carry out strictly the terms of his agreement with the Cardinal, he must reimburse the papal treasury by 6,000 florins.
At 20 florins per lance per month, the usual mercenary rate, the sum indicates that the force assigned to Coucy numbered 300 lances, rather than the 1,000 originally promised by the Pope. Three hundred lances was a normal-size company in the contracts of the time, which ranged from 60 or 70 to 1,000 lances, of three mounted men each, plus mounted archers, foot soldiers, and servants.
In December the Pope formally appointed Coucy Captain-General of the papal company operating in Lombardy against the “sons of damnation.” The appointment reflected Gregory’s impatience with Amadeus, who had undertaken to advance on Milan from the west, but was still in Piedmont, defending his own territory against Visconti forces. Coucy’s mission was to join Hawkwood, now in papal employ, who had retired to Bologna