A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [171]
Seizing their chance, Coucy and Hawkwood regrouped their battered numbers and charged down upon Gian Galeazzo. Unhorsed, with lance beaten from his hand and helmet from his head, he was saved only by the valiant fighting of his Milanese men-at-arms, who covered his escape from the field but were themselves overcome before the mercenaries could be reassembled. In an upset as astonishing in miniature as Poitiers, the inferior papal force triumphed and bore from the field the Visconti banners and 200 prisoners including thirty high-ranking Lombard nobles good for rich ransoms. The Pope pronounced the victory a miracle, and its report, traveling swiftly to France, endowed Coucy with sudden fame. In the small world of his time, fame was easily won; more important was what he learned. Coucy never again indulged himself in that reckless attack for which French knighthood as a whole had so great an affinity.
Militarily, Montichiari had little impact. It led to no junction with Savoy because the Coucy-Hawkwood force, bloodied and depleted, judged it rash to try to break through, and withdrew instead to Bologna, to the great distress of the Pope. He kept pleading for the junction with Savoy to crush Bernabò, that “Son of Belial.” He promised Hawkwood that delayed payments would soon be made, and covered Coucy with compliments on his “loyal and careful good judgment, remarkable honesty and well-known prudence.” Recognizing “by the test of experience your great decisiveness and foresight,” the Pope renewed Coucy’s commission as Captain-General in June. Hawkwood, whose company was the mainstay of the force, was not one to give action without pay, and his unpaid men were growing rebellious. Passing through Mantua, they inflicted such injury and thievery upon the citizens as caused the lord of Mantua to complain to the Pope, who in turn begged Coucy to restrain the “forces of the Church” from committing further damage. The danger if not the irony of using brigands to restore papal authority was becoming apparent.
By a brave fight through a narrow pass, the Count of Savoy broke out of his position and was able to advance and join Coucy and Hawkwood at Bologna, from where, all together, they marched westward again in July. Again at Modena the mercenaries aroused the fury of the citizens, which the Pope almost tearfully begged Coucy to appease, especially as Modena belonged to the Papal League. Reaching Piacenza in August 1373, the papal forces laid siege to the city, but the effort petered out when Amadeus fell ill. From that point, under heavy rains flooding rivers, assaults by Bernabò’s troops, and general lack of enthusiasm, the offensive disintegrated.
As captain of a force now thoroughly disorganized and compromised, Coucy saw little future in the papal war. On the grounds of long absence from his wife and children and his estate, and the need to care for his affairs in his own war-torn country, he applied for leave to return to France. Gregory graciously granted the release on January 23, 1374, with further fulsome tributes to Coucy’s loyalty, devotion, decisiveness, “great honesty,” and other virtues “with which you have been endowed by the Almighty.” Considering that Coucy was abandoning the cause, the excess of flattery may have been meant to cover an absence of cash, for the money due him was not paid by the papal treasury until many years later.
His departure may have been given added impetus by the recurrence of the Black Death in Italy and southern France in 1373–74. Under its influence, Gregory’s war effort dwindled away. Discouraged by illness, Amadeus concluded a separate peace with Galeazzo and abandoned the Pope once his own interests in Piedmont