A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [180]
Solid and everlasting, Coucy’s bequest did not exhibit the urgency of some donors. The Captal de Buch in a will of 1369, the year he abandoned French fealty, evidently felt the need of immediate sanction: he left 40,000 gold écus for 50,000 masses, all to be said within a year of his death, plus perpetual lamps and additional pious legacies.
These endowed chantries, ranging up to periods of thirty or fifty years or perpetuity, and usually including the relatives of the donor, provided employment to the clergy and income to the churches. Unattached priests with no other function could make a living from the commissions and otherwise lead, as was popularly supposed, an idle and dissolute life. The Princess of Wales maintained three priests whose only duty was to say prayers for her deceased first husband.
While his assembled forces plundered Alsace for six weeks through October and into November, Coucy still had not taken command. His delay is the first puzzle among many that cannot be unraveled in this strange winter war because of gaps and contradictions in the record. Did he postpone deliberately to add to the chance of depleting the companies through the hardships of winter? The fact that Du Guesclin too, in 1365, did not begin his march across the Pyrenees until December suggests a pattern. But Coucy was clearly intending to fight it out with his mother’s cousin Leopold, not merely to lead the companies on a goose-chase over the Jura and lose them somewhere in the mountain snows.
At the end of September he had written to the Duke of Brabant, imperial Vicar in Alsace, informing him of his intention to reclaim Brisgau, Sundgau, and the small county of Ferrette, and had received an assurance that no imperial action would be taken to oppose his efforts to obtain justice. Further to make a case for a just war and distinguish himself from a mere captain of mercenaries, Coucy also wrote to the towns of Strasbourg and Colmar in Alsace disclaiming any threat against them, stating his claim against his cousin, urging them not to take alarm but to aid him in obtaining his rights, and offering to explain his case further if they wished. This elicited no answer, since beneath the city walls the companies were already doing their worst.
If the cry of horror in the local chronicles is evidence, never was carnage worse than in Alsace. Forty villages in the Sundgau were robbed and wrecked, 100 inhabitants of Wattwiller killed without mercy, men and women seized to serve the brigands’ needs, the Franciscan monastery of Thann burned to the ground, the convent of Schoenensteinbach so ruined that it was abandoned and its lands not cleared again for twenty years. The companies exacted their usual tribute, which the rich paid in money, horses, and fine fabrics, and the poor in shoes, horseshoes, and nails. When questioned as to the purpose of their campaign, some captains reportedly replied that they had come for “60,000 florins, sixty stallions fit for combat, and sixty garments of gold cloth.” The Bishop and magistrates of Strasbourg paid 3,000 florins to ransom the city from attack. In one place where a band of combative villagers succeeded in killing twenty of the enemy billeted among them, they suffered such cruelties in retaliation that audacity gave way to despair and they fled, abandoning their homes.
At the outset, the captains